UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 
AT    LOS  ANGELES 


THE 

MANCHESTER   GUARDIAN 

A  CENTURY  OF  HISTORY 


(11  \Ki,i:s  i'Ri:si  w  icii  scoi  r. 

Editor   tif    ihr    M inulicslci    (iitniJimi    since    1872. 


I'niiii    (I    phdlni^xipli    Ink  til    III    1020. 


THE 
MANCHESTER   GUARDIAN 

A  CENTURY  OF  HISTORY 


BY 


WILLIAM  HASLAM  MILLS 


With  a  Special  Introduction  for  the  American  Edition 

BY 
CHARLES  PRESTWICH  SCOTT 

Editor  of   "  The  Manchester   Guardian "   since  1872 


NEW  YORK 

HENRY  HOLT  AND  COMPANY 

1922 


%       •      m        m     * 


,  •      ■»  ■«   •  • 


»        '  C 


•  -• 


>  ,  »  "     •      •     •.  •    ;   •.  ;.^  :.\  %•  , 


Copyright,   1922 

BY 

HENRY  HOLT  AND  COMPANY 


PRINTED    IN    THE    U     S     *     Br 

Cbt  fiuinn  &  Sobtn  Companp 


BOOK       M A N U F ACT U R C n S 
RAHWAY  NEW      JERBEV 


r  1^ 

CHARLES    PRESTWICH    SCOTT  V ,  '  "i 


To  bring  the  dispositions  that  are  lovely  in  private  life  into  the 
service  and  conduct  of  the  commonwealth  ;  so  to  be  patriots  as 
not  to  forget  we  are  gentlemen. 

EDMUND    BURKE 

.^  in  The  Present  Discontents. 

a. 

— for  the  growing  good  of  the  world  is  partly  dependent  on 
unhistoric  acts  j   and  that  things  are  not  so  ill  with  you  and  me 
~^s  they  might  have  been,  is  half  owing  to  the  number  who  lived 
faithfully  a  hidden  life  and  rest  in  unvisited  tombs. 


V 


GEORGE    ELIOT : 

The  concluding  words  of  Middlemarch. 


^ 


'M2{^^ 


The  author  Is  Indebted  to  the  proprietors 
oj  the  "  Manchester  Guardian  "  jor 
permission  to  republish  this  briej  history 
which  appeared  in  their  Centenary 
Number  on  May  5,  1921. 


Qontents^ 


CHAPTER  V\Qt. 

I.   A  YOUNG  MAN  IN  A  YOUNG  CITY  i 

II.   THE  BIRTH  OF  A  NEWSPAPER  23 

III.  IN  THE  DAYS  OF  SMALL  THINGS  39 

IV.  CLASSICAL  MANCHESTER  65 
V.   WHIGGISM  89 

VI.   THE  HAPPY  LIBERALS  103 

VII.   THE  SOUL  OF  A  NEWSPAPER  127 


Illustrations 

To  face 
Page 
CHARLES  PRESTWICH  SCOTT,  Editor 

of  the  "Manchester  Guardian"  since  1872      (From 

a  photograph  taken  in  1920}  Frontispiece 

PETERLOO,  from  a  Contemporary  Print  26 

JOHN    EDWARD    T  A  Y  LO  R,  /o««^^r    and 
first  Editor  of  the  "Manchester  Guardian"  48 

Mr.  COBDEN  addressing  the  Council  of  the  Anti- 
Corn  Law  League  78 

JEREMIAH    GARNETT  92 

WILLIAM  THOMAS  ARNOLD  118 

The  second  JOHN    EDWARD    TAYLOR, 

Editor  of  the  "Manchester  Guardian"  from  1861 

till  1 87 1,  and  proprietor  until  1905  138 

The   Site  of  the  "Manchester  Guardian"  Building 

as  it  was  in   1821  142 

The  Site  to-day  144 


INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  AMERICAN 

EDITION 

I  AM  perhaps  the  last  person  who  should  write  a 
prefatory  word  to  this  admirable  book,  of  my  friend 
and  colleague,  Mr,  Haslam  Mills.  In  it  he  has  written 
much  which  is  not  only  of  great  interest  as  a  picture 
of  the  social  and  political  development  of  the  country 
for  a  hundred  years  reflected  In  the  life  of  a  news- 
paper, but  he  has  displayed  all  this,  Inevitably  no 
doubt,  from  that  newspaper's  standpoint  and  with  my- 
self as  in  some  sort  Its  director  for  half  of  the  period. 

But  In  spite  of  this  all  too  personal  Interest  In  the 
work  and  Its  subject  I  cannot  deny  myself  the  pleasure 
of  adding  a  few  words  for  the  American  Edition.  It 
seems  such  a  friendly  thing  to  have  an  American  Edi- 
tion and  that  It  should  be  taken  for  granted  that  quite 
an  appreciable  number  of  American  citizens  should  be 
Interested  In  the  life  and  development  of  a  single  Eng- 
lish newspaper.  That  goes  to  show  how  close  we  all 
are  to  each, other,  how  innumerable  are  the  strands  of 
which  this  Is  but  one  of  the  smallest,  which  bind  the 
two  countries  together.  Yet  after  all  Is  it  so  very 
small  ?  The  newspaper  to-day  plays  a  tremendous  part 
In  the  life  of  all  the  more  advanced  nations  and  per- 
haps a  larger  part  In  Great  Britain  and  America  than 
in  any  other  countries.  And  undoubtedly  we  influence 
each  other. 

in 


Mostly  the  influence  is  from  your  side  to  ours,  as 
witness  the  vast  development  in  the  last  twenty  years 
of  the  English  popular  press  formed  on  American 
models.  But  perhaps  there  are  reactions  also  the  other 
way.  We  are  so  like  and  yet  in  so  many  ways  so 
different  that  we  can  hardly  help  having  some  effect 
on  each  other.  One  great  difference  between  the  news- 
papers of  the  two  countries  is  that  the  British  ones 
are  more  distinctly  political  ^nd  that  is  largely  due 
to  a  difference  in  institutions.  If  the  House  of  Rep- 
resentatives exercised,  besides  its  own  powers,  nearly 
all  those  also  of  the  Senate  and  controlled  the  Presi- 
dent, and  if  besides  there  were  no  fixed  term  to  its 
existence  and  it  might  be  driven  any  day  to  a  General 
Election,  what  a  mighty  difference  it  would  make  to  the 
day-to-day  interest  of  American  domestic  politics  and 
what  an  invasion  there  would  be  of  the  columns  of 
newspapers  by  political  discussion.  You  would  live 
as  it  were  in  a  perpetual  Presidential  election  campaign. 
I  do  not  pretend  to  say  whether  this  would  be  an  ad- 
vantage or  not,  but  at  least  your  newspapers  would 
become  a  good  deal  more  like  ours. 

Another  great  difference  arises  from  American  iso- 
lation. You  are  so  vast,  so  remote,  and  so  self-con- 
tained that  the  affairs  of  the  outside  world  tend  to 
lose  interest  for  you.  That  is  changing.  You  have 
just  taken  part  in  a  tremendous  European  War  and 
you  cannot,  with  the  best  will  in  the  world,  wholly  free 
yourselves  from  responsibility  for  its  consequences. 
At  this  moment  *  you  are  engaged  in  the  closing  scenes 
of  a  great  international  conference  in  your  capital,  by 

•Written  January  1922. 


IV 


far  the  greatest  peaceful  conference  which  has  ever- 
been  held  and  likely  to  be  the  most  important  and  fruit- 
ful in  its  outcome.  That  brings  you  again  in  a  re- 
sponsible way  right  up  against  the  facts  of  the  world 
situation.  Your  newspapers  are  full  of  it.  They  will 
never  again  be  able  quite  to  empty  themselves. 

So  we  are  getting  nearer  to  each  other,  not  only 
in  our  press  but  in  our  peoples.  The  World  is  shrink- 
ing. Space  is  every  day  being  bridged.  Already  we 
can  telegraph  through  the  air  or  the  ether,  from  Pen- 
zance to  Melbourne  and  to-morrow  we  shall  be  able 
to  talk  by  the  same  mechanism.  Physical  boundaries 
are  disappearing;  moral  boundaries  must  speedily  fol- 
low suit.  The  English-speaking  peoples  should  then 
be  quite  a  comfortable  family,  gathered  as  it  were 
round  a  common  hearth. 

What  a  change  for  the  world !  What  a  chance  for 
the  newspaper!  More  and  more  we  shall  take  our 
pulpit  seriously  and  preach  to  all  the  world.  The 
"Manchester  Guardian"  has  just  celebrated  its  cen- 
tury of  more  or  less  creditable  existence.  May  the 
American  reader  of  this  memorial  volume  be  kind  to 
our  faults  and  believe  that  we  live  in  hopes  of  cor- 
recting at  least  some  of  them  1 

One  thought  recurs  in  looking  back  over  these  hun- 
dred years.  During  all  that  great  space  of  time  the 
two  countries,  though  they  have  had  their  tiffs  and 
seen  rather  dangerous  ones,  have  never  struck  a  blow 
in  anger.  Now  they  are  closer  to  each  other  than 
ever  since  the  day  they  parted.  Washington  has 
shown  that;  the  settlement  with  Ireland  has  confirmed 
it.     That  Treaty  will  stand;  it  is  among  the  memora- 


"ble  events  of  history.  No  man  can  tell  what  the  future 
may  hold  for  the  relations  of  the  two  countries,  but, 
whatever  may  have  been  ill  done  in  the  past,  this 
surely  has  been  well  done  and  will  help  to  sweeten 
the  whole  future.  My  own  recollection  goes  back 
over  the  long  years  since  Mr.  Gladstone  introduced  his 
first  Home  Rule  Bill,  the  best  and  bravest  of  the  three. 
I  have  no  hesitation  in  saying  that  the  settlement  now 
reached  is  better,  because  it  is  more  complete,  than 
any  of  those  previously  attempted.  My  only  regret 
is  for  the  things  that  have  happened  in  between,  for 
the  continuance  of  repression,  above  all  for  the  latest 
extremes  of  violence,  for  the  useless  addition  to  the 
sum  of  things  which  history  must  reprobate  and  then 
must  seek  to  forget.  It  is  as  the  crowning  achievement 
In  a  long  struggle  that  it  appealed  first  and  foremost 
to  the  mind  of  the  statesman  who  has  carried  it 
through.  I  met  him  a  few  hours  after  the  Treaty  had 
been  signed.  "To  think  that  our  long  struggle  is 
over!"  That  expressed  his  thought  as  it  did  mine. 
It  is  not  in  Ireland  and  England  alone  that  there  will 
be  relief. 

C.  P.  Scott. 


I:    A  YOUNG  MAN  IN  A  TOUNG  CITY 


CHAPTER     I 

^  Yomig  ^dan  in  a  Young  Qity 

§1 

IF  we  go  back  to  the  origin  of  a  newspaper 
which  was  established  a  hundred  years  ago 
we  shall  most  likely  find  ourselves  in  a  com- 
motion of  human  affairs.  Its  origin  is  almost 
certain  to  have  been  volcanic,  and  we  shall  dis- 
cover that  it  was  projected  into  the  world  by  a 
storm. 

The  reasons  which  suggest  and  encourage  the 
establishment  of  a  newspaper  to-day  did  not 
exist  a  hundred  years  ago.  In  our  times  news 
is  as  saleable  and  merchantable  a  commodity 
as  soap.  It  is  the  only  valuable  thing  in  the 
world  which  grows  everywhere  of  its  own  accord. 
There  is  not  a  monarchy  or  a  republic  in  the 
world  in  which  it  is  not  being  produced  day  by 
day  and  every  day  ;  nor  is  there  a  street  or  a 
house  about  us  in  which  it  might  not  spring  up 
suddenly  in  wild  profusion.  It  is  at  once  as 
common  as  the  sands  and  as  valuable  as  fine  gold. 
It  is  a  kind  of  mineral  wealth,  and  progress  has 
consisted  not  so  much  in  creating  as  in  unearthing 
it.  Morning  by  morning  and  week  by  week 
there  was  quite  as  much  to  be  told  about  the 
world  one  hundred  years  ago  as  there  is  to-day. 
The  coal  was  always  underneath  the  valleys, 
and  we  have  merely  sunk  the  shafts.  Journalism, 
also,  has  developed  on  these  lines  ;   it  has  bored 

3 


througli  to  the  Antipodes.  It  lifts  out  of  the 
invisible  and  the  inaudible  the  fuel  and  nourish- 
ment of  an  enormous  universal  curiosity.  It  has 
become  one  of  the  great  providing  industries 
of  the  world. 

Two  great  movements  of  recent  years  have 
united  to  bring  this  about.  One  of  them  is 
mechanical  invention,  and  the  other  is  popular 
education.  It  has  become  possible  to  collect 
news  from  all  parts  of  the  country  and  of  the 
world  as  though  there  were  no  such  thing  as 
space  ;  to  print  it  and  even  to  illustrate  it  as  though 
there  were  hardly  such  a  thing  as  time,  and  to 
circulate  it  among  vast  numbers  of  people,  most 
of  whom  are  trained  to  a  high  state  of,  at  any  rate, 
superficial  curiosity  and  all  of  them  able  to  read. 
One  hundred  years  ago  journalism  had  no  ad- 
vantages such  as  these.  The  first  number  of  the 
Manchester  Guardian  appeared  on  May  5, 
I  821,  and  it  happens  curiously  that  its  first  issue 
coincided  to  the  day  and  almost  to  the  hour 
with  one  of  the  most  interesting  and  provocative 
events  in  human  history.  This  was  the  death  of 
Napoleon  at  St.  Helena  on  May  5,  1821.  The 
world  is  still  greedy,  after  one  hundred  years, 
for  any  new  detail  of  that  wonderful  last  phase. 
Could  the  event  occur  again,  were  it  known  that 
such  an  event  were  pending  within  the  four 
quarters  of  the  world,  modern  journalism  would 
station  itself  like  a  cat  in  front  of  the  aperture, 
and  wait  for  it,  rapt  and  quivering.  We  look 
in  vain  through  the  first  issues  of  the  Manchester 

4 


Guardian  for  any  account  of  the  death  of  Napo- 
leon. When  it  is  at  last  mentioned,  we  find  it 
not  announced,  but  alluded  to  as  something 
which  had  got  into  the  public  consciousness 
without  the  aid  of  the  newspapers.  The  fact 
was  in  the  world  and  journalism  knew  it  not. 
It  was  there,  but  it  could  not  be  reached  through 
the  envelope  of  time  and  space.  The  opening 
of  that  envelope  has  transformed  journalism  ; 
brought  into  it  many  with  whom  it  tends  to  be 
rather  a  trade  than  a  calling  ;  secularized  it  and 
possibly  materialized  it  not  a  little. 

But  if  we  return  to  the  origin  of  a  newspaper 
established  a  century  ago  we  shall  find  ourselves 
among  the  things  of  the  mind  and  spirit.  Among 
movements  !  Among  martyrdoms  !  A  news- 
paper in  that  age  had  much  soul  and  very  little 
substance.  It  was  most  probably  established, 
not  to  make  money,  but  to  make  opinion.  It 
had  something  to  say  but  very  little  to  tell. 
It  thought  much  more  than  it  knew.  It  was 
printed  laboriously  by  hand,  and  if  its  opinions 
were  in  advance  of  its  times  it  was  edited  in  dire 
peril  of  the  law.  The  Manchester  Guardian  was 
born  in  this  age  of  journalism.  It  was  born  of 
the  spirit  of  its  age.  Its  roots  bring  up  much 
soil  of  genuine,  significant  history.  It  had  its 
origin  in  imputed  heresy  and  schism  and  in  the 
struggle  of  thought  to  be  free.  We  could  no 
more  account  for  its  beginning  without  reference 
to  the  political  history  of  the  English  people 
than   we   could   explain   the   origin   of  its   near 

5 


neighbour  the  Cross  Street  Chapel  without  enter- 
ing on  the  history  of  rehgious  thought. 

§11 

At  the  beginning  of  the  hist  century  there 
was  Hving  in  Huhiie,  then  a  rural  suburb  of 
Manchester,  a  certain  John  Taylor,  the  pro- 
prietor of  what  was  called  a  classical  academy 
for  boys.  This  John  Taylor  came  of  a  family 
which  had  settled  at  Stand,  near  to  Manchester, 
and  he  was  himself  educated  at  the  Stand  Gram- 
mar School.  The  village  of  Stand  is  still  dis- 
tinguished by  an  historic  Unitarian  chapel,  and 
John  Taylor,  being  associated  with  its  congrega- 
tion, entered  the  Unitarian  ministry,  and  was 
appointed  to  the  charge  of  a  congregation  at 
Ilminster,  in  Somersetshire.  The  church  at  II- 
minster  seems  to  have  been  visited  by  doubts 
of  the  spirit.  The  Rev.  John  Taylor  reconsidered 
his  thinking,  with  the  result  that  he  left  the 
Unitarian  body,  removed  with  his  wife,  who 
was  a  religious  poetess  of  some  note,  to  Bristol, 
where  he  engaged  in  scholastic  work,  and  finally 
settled  in  Manchester,  the  school  which  he 
opened  in  Hulme  enjoying  the  patronage  of  the 
Society  of  Friends,  and  he  himself  being  now 
numbered  among  the  Quakers. 

To  John  Taylor,  while  still  acting  as  a  Uni- 
tarian minister  at  Ilminster,  was  born  in  1791 
a  son,  John  Edward  Taylor,  who  grew  up  to  be 
one  of  the  early  reformers,  to  give  powerful  aid 
to  the  people  in  the  affair  of  Peterloo,  to  suffer 

6 


himself  in  the  cause  of  reform,  and  to  find  along 
this  dark  and  stormy  path  the  final  purpose  of 
his  life  in  the  establishment  of  the  Manchester 
Guardian.  John  Edward  Taylor  spent  a  studious 
youth  at  his  father's  house  in  Islington  Street, 
Salford.  At  the  age  of  fifteen  he  was  having 
lessons  in  mathematics  twice  a  week  from  John 
Dalton,  the  scientist,  who  was  teaching  in  Faulk- 
ner Street.  When  the  time  came  for  him  to  be- 
gin life  for  himself  he  was  put  to  join  a  manu- 
facturer of  the  name  of  Oakden,  and  in  this 
business  he  rose  steadily  and  rapidly  from  the 
status  of  an  apprentice  to  that  of  a  partner. 
While  he  was  still  a  youth  Joseph  Lancaster 
began  to  travel  the  country  to  explain  and  ex- 
pound the  methods  of  teaching  poor  children 
which  he  had  adopted  at  the  famous  school  in 
the  Borough  Road,  London.  Earnest  people  in 
many  parts  of  the  country  formed  Lancasterian 
schools  to  supply  the  almost  complete  absence 
of  popular  education,  and  of  one  of  these  Lancas- 
terian schools,  which  speedily  drifted  into  deep 
theological  waters  and  was  torn  by  the  secession 
from  its  Committee  of  all  the  Socinian  members, 
John  Edward  Taylor  became  the  secretary. 

Glimpses  are  possible  to  us  of  the  domestic 
life  in  Islington  Street,  Salford — the  father  an 
anxious  navigator  among  the  metaphysics  who 
had  already  travelled  from  Unitarianism  to 
Quakerism,  and  was  now  drifting  to  Sweden- 
borgianism  ;  the  mother  dead  ;  the  only  sister 
away   on   a   round   of  visits   among   Dissenting 

7 


friends  and  connections,  and  the  young  John 
Edward  Taylor  finding  sometliing  short  of  com- 
plete diversion  in  the  undiluted  company  of  the 
theologian.  "  Even  a  well-furnished  table,"  we 
hear  of  him  saying,  "  is  unsatisfactory  without 
a  woman  at  it."  The  father  seems  to  have  felt 
this  too.  "  But  with  these  things  (the  troubles 
at  the  Lancasterian  School  caused  by  the  Socinian 
members)  it  is  not  necessary,"  he  writes  to  his 
daughter,  "  while  thou  art  at  this  distance  to 
trouble  thee,  but  on  these  and  many  other  ac- 
counts I  want  the  comfort  of  thy  company,  and 
so  does  Edward.  We  had  last  evening  (FelDruary 
4,  1 8 1 2)  B.  Oakden  to  drink  tea  with  us,  and 
his  wife  and  niece,  w^hich  last  came  near  an  hour 
before  the  others,  and  I  could  not  help  admiring 
how  comfortable  it  seemed  to  have  a  female 
about  the  house." 

John  Edward  Taylor  was,  however,  finding 
many  interests  in  the  town.  He  was  a  member 
of  the  Junior  Literary  and  Philosophical  Society. 
He  paid  occasional  visits  to  London,  and  his 
interest  in  the  Liberal  movement  of  the  day 
is  shown  in  a  visit  which  he  paid  while  in  London 
to  Leigh  Hunt,  who,  having  narrowly  and  chiefly 
by  the  merits  of  Henry  Brougham's  advocacy, 
escaped  punishment  for  an  article  on  the  savagery 
of  military  floggings,  was  now,  when  John 
Edward  Taylor  called  on  him,  undergoing  two 
years'  imprisonment  for  describing  the  Prince 
Regent  as  *'  a  corpulent  man  of  fifty,  a  libertine 
over  head  and  ears  in  disgrace,  a  man  who  has 

8 


just  closed  half  a  century  without  one  single 
claim  on  the  gratitude  of  his  country  or  the 
respect  of  posterity."  John  Edward  Taylor 
writes  to  his  sister  an  account  of  his  visit  to  Leigh 
Hunt,  '*  a  very  interesting  and  agreeable  young 
man,  and,  all  things  considered,  quite  as  com- 
fortable as  can  be  expected  in  prison  "  ;  encloses 
a  copy  of  Lord  Byron's  Giaour  (just  out)  ; 
announces  his  intention  of  staying  another  night 
in  London  to  be  present  at  Covent  Garden, 
and  concludes  by  hoping  that  his  father  *'  is  in 
good  health  and  (what  is  perhaps  of  more  con- 
sequence) good  humour."  A  very  sprightly 
letter!  It  was  about  this  time,  1812  or  1813, 
that  John  Edward  Taylor,  notwithstanding  that 
he  was  doing  well  in  the  cotton  business,  in 
which  his  exact  functions  were  those  of  a  "  chap- 
man," began  to  find  his  main  interest  in  politics 
and  formed  the  habit  of  contributing  paragraphs 
to  the  Manchester  press.  Like  Leigh  Hunt, 
he  was  destined  to  find  Liberal  journalism  in 
the  early  years  of  the  nineteenth  century  a 
perilous  game. 

The  early  reformers  in  Manchester  went  in 
fear  of  their  lives  from  two  sides.  On  the  one 
side  was  the  magistrate  ;  on  the  other,  the  mob. 
From  the  outbreak  of  the  French  Revolution 
in  1789  until  a  period  which  we  may  fix  about 
the  year  18 12  there  was  in  Manchester  an  in- 
formal but  effective  co-operation  between  law 
and  disorder  against  the  few  men  who  stood  out 
for  liberal   ideas.     In    1792   these   men    formed 

9 


the  "  Manchester  Constitutional  Society."  In 
the  membership  we  find  the  names  of  Thomas 
Walker,  James  Darbishire,  George  Lloyd, 
Thomas  Cooper  (a  barrister),  George  Philips 
(afterwards  Sir  George  Philips),  and  Thomas 
Kershaw.  The  Society  aimed  at  altering  by 
peaceful  means  a  representative  system  which 
allowed  two  members  of  Parliament  to  Old 
Sarum,  which  was  an  empty  field,  and  denied  a 
voice  in  the  government  of  the  country  to  great 
cities  like  Manchester  and  Birmingham.  Twelve 
years  before  the  Constitutional  Society  was 
formed,  its  opinions  had  enjoyed  the  open  sup- 
port of  William  Pitt,  and  at  the  trial  of  Home 
Tooke,  in  1794,  William  Pitt  was  called  as  a 
witness  for  the  defence  to  say  that  the  doctrines 
and  practices  of  the  reformers  of  1794  were 
precisely  those  which  he  himself  had  held  in  1780. 
But  in  the  meantime  the  French  Revolution 
had  occurred.  William  Pitt,  the  pupil  of  Adam 
Smith  and  the  young  hope  of  Liberalism,  was 
now,  as  Prime  Minister,  fighting,  at  once  on 
the  battlefields  of  Europe  and  in  the  police 
courts  of  England,  with  subsidies  abroad  and 
with  spies  at  home,  a  war  against  all  opinion 
which  was  not  the  opinion  of  George  IIL  The 
Reign  of  Terror  began.  Louis  XVL  was  exe- 
cuted, and  George  IIL  feared  that  "  if  a  stop  was 
not  put  to  French  principles  there  would  not 
be  a  king  left  in  Europe  in  a  few  years."  All 
Europe  shivered  with  horror  at  such  deeds. 
Highly  residential  Mosley  Street  shivered,  and 

10 


the  several  orders  of  Manchester  society,  the 
men  of  the  law  and  the  men  of  the  Gospel, 
the  Boroughreeve  and  constables,  and  the  Fellows 
of  the  Collegiate  Church,  whom  we  should  now 
call  the  Canons  of  the  Cathedral,  joined  together 
in  the  process  known  as  nipping  it  in  the  bud. 
Tsarism  began.  Its  chief  instrument  was  Joseph 
Nadin,  the  deputy  constable,  an  official  whose 
broad  Lancashire  dialect,  great  physical  girth 
and  sallow  face,  and  the  heavy,  illiterate  hand 
which  he  brought  to  bear  on  the  fine  points 
of  what  a  man  had  said  and  what  he  had  meant, 
have  won  for  him  a  permanent  place  among  the 
characters  of  gaolership,  though  it  is  fair  to  add 
that  Samuel  Bamford,  the  weaver-poet,  found 
something  in  the  man  which  he  did  not  wholly 
dislike.  To  every  weaver  in  Manchester  who 
had  on  his  conscience  so  much  as  a  single  visit 
to  a  political  club  "  Mesthur  Nadin  "  was  a  name 
of  terror.  The  principles  which  actuated  him 
as  a  public  official  are  summarized  in  an  ex- 
tract from  his  professional  talk  to  a  political 
prisoner  whom  he  was  conducting  from  Middle- 
ton  to  Manchester.  "  Ween  larn  thee,"  he  said 
in  the  carriage  on  the  way  to  the  New  Bailey 
prison,  "  ween  larn  thee  to  be  a  Jacobin."  And 
so  they  did  !  The  members  of  the  Manchester 
Constitutional  Society  were  marked  men.  In 
1794  Thomas  Walker  was  tried  at  the  Lancaster 
Assizes  on  an  indictment  of  conspiracy  with 
others  to  overthrow  the  Constitution  and  Govern- 
ment.    The  spy  who  was  the  principal  witness 

II 


against  him  broke  down  completely  under  cross- 
examination,  and  the  jury  returned  a  verdict  of 
not  guilty.  But  the  terms  in  which  the  judge 
dismissed  the  prisoner  from  the  dock  show  clearly 
that  the  affair  had  gone  near  to  hang  him.  The 
early  reformers  were  broken  up.  They  were  too 
far  in  advance  of  their  times.  Some  went  ^o 
live  in  Liverpool.  Others  ceased  to  be  Whigs. 
Life  in  the  town  was,  in  fact,  unbearable  for 
a  Whig. 

For  these  exertions  of  the  magistrates  and 
the  spies  had  about  them  one  quality  which 
we  should  not  expect.  They  were  on  the  whole 
popular  measures.  They  reflected  the  sentiment 
of  the  town.  Manchester  was  not  at  this  time, 
and  never  has  been  throughout  its  history,  a  Whig 
city.  It  has  nothing  like  the  Whig  record  of 
the  City  of  London  or  the  City  of  Westminster 
or  that  of  Birmingham.  In  1745  it  was  a 
Jacobite  town,  devoted  to  "  legitimism  "  and  the 
divine  right  of  kings,  burning  torches  below 
the  bed-chamber  of  the  foolish  Pretender,  whose 
headquarters  in  the  city  can  still  be  faintly 
traced  in  the  name  of  "  Palace  Street,"  off 
Market  Street.  Exactly  one  hundred  years  later 
— in  1845 — ^^^^  town  was  on  the  eve  of  wanning 
the  great  triumph  of  thought  and  will  which 
placed  it  among  the  intellectually  illustrious 
cities  of  the  world.  But  the  argument  which 
was  coming  to  its  tremendous  close  in  1845  ^^^ 
economic,  and  the  statesman  who  translated 
the  will  of  Manchester  into  an  Act  of  Parliament 

12 


was  a  Conservative.  The  Manchester  School 
was  a  school  of  economic  thinking.  Between 
the  dates  1745  and  1845  ^^^  ^^^7  ^^^  reacted, 
and,  since  then  and  down  to  present  times,  it 
has  continued  to  react  on  the  whole  unfavourably 
to  Whig  and  Liberal  tests.  It  dismissed  Bright. 
It  was  never  Gladstonian,  and  in  our  own  times 
of  1906,  when  it  once  again  for  a  few  moments 
led  the  Liberal  thinking  of  England,  the  issue 
before  the  country  was  an  economic  one. 

It  was  this  state  of  popular  sentiment — the 
vox  populi — rather  than  the  severity  of  the 
magistrate  or  the  industry  of  the  spy  which 
crushed  the  early  reformers  among  whom  John 
Edward  Taylor's  boyhood  was  spent.  The  people 
voted  steadily  for  Barabbas.  In  1793  Pitt  had 
declared  the  war  against  French  principles  which 
was  to  last  on  and  off  for  twenty-two  years  ; 
which  made  and  had  to  be  continued  till  it  un- 
made Napoleon  ;  which  cost  us  twelve  hundred 
millions  sterling,  and  ended  by  restoring  the 
Bourbons  to  France  and  saddling  England  with 
a  corn  law  which  caused  the  country  thirty  years 
of  semi-starvation.  In  Manchester  the  war  was 
very  popular.  The  fathers  had  lost  nights  of 
sleep  for  '*  Prince  Charlie  "  and  the  divine  right 
of  kings,  and  the  sons  now  proceeded  to  sustain 
themselves  body  and  soul  on  military  glory  and 
to  be  richly  blessed  with  the  spectacle  of  men 
marching  and  counter-marching  on  Kersal  Moor. 
The  Whig  reformers,  who  were  opposed  to  the 
war,  became  "  the  friends  of  the  enemy."     They 

13 


were  '*  pro-French,"  just  as  Burke  a  few  years 
before  had  been  a  "  pro-American."  Being 
"  pro-French,"  they  were  excommunicated  from 
the  town. 

The  method  of  excommunication  was  simple. 
Manchester  in  those  days  circulated  around  its 
inns  and  taverns  and  public-houses,  of  which 
in  1793  there  were  186.  To  understand  the  ex- 
communication of  Liberal  opinion  we  have  to 
understand  that  in  those  days  there  was  no  drink 
question.  Drink  was  not  a  question  at  all,  but 
an  axiom  or  a  postulate,  and  that  hardly  less 
among  Nonconformists  than  in  the  circles  of 
Church  and  King.  It  will  indeed  be  remembered 
that  some  of  the  staunchest  pillars  of  the  early 
Evangelicals,  and  of  the  Clapham  set  in  which 
Macaulay  was  brought  up,  were  brewers,  and 
rather  proud  of  it.  There  were  in  English 
society  in  those  days  none  of  those  concentrations 
of  purpose  on  single  ends  which  we  call  **  causes  " 
or  "  fads,"  according  as  we  subscribe  to  them  or 
not.  The  first  of  the  long  and  diversified  pro- 
cession of  "  causes  "  was  the  movement  for  the 
abolition  of  slavery.  The  temperance  move- 
ment did  not  begin  till  towards  the  thirties  of  the 
last  century,  though  Henry  Hunt,  the  orator  of 
Peterloo,  had  before  this  period  inculcated  total 
abstinence  and  caused  it  to  spread  among  his 
Radical  followers  mainly  as  a  method  of  depriving 
an  aristocratic  and  arbitrary  Government  of  its 
revenue.  Accordingly,  when  the  186  publicans 
and   innkeepers   of  Manchester  joined    together 

14 


in  a  solemn  pledge  to  refuse  the  custom  of  "  the 
daring  miscreants  whose  object  it  was  to  assist  the 
French  savages,"  under  which  form  of  words 
(drawn  up  for  them  by  one  of  the  Collegiate 
Church  clergy)  they  were  understood  without 
ambiguity  to  be  referring  to  the  Whig  party 
of  Manchester,  they  pronounced  a  sentence 
of  all  but  social  extinction.  As  late  as  1825 
there  was  on  a  wall  of  a  public-house  in  Bridge 
Street  a  board  bearing  the  words  "  No  Jacobins 
admitted  here,"  but  in  that  year  the  tide  of 
opinion  had  turned,  and  the  board,  which  was 
not  so  much  a  board  as  a  mural  tablet,  was 
removed. 

The  people  backed  up  these  measures  against 
the  peace  party  with  energetic  undertakings  of 
their  own.  They  "  said  ditto  to  Mr.  Burke." 
The  doors  of  Cross  Street  Chapel  were  hammered 
in  with  trees  rooted  up  in  St.  Ann's  Square  in 
the  belief  that  that  building  was  a  nest  of  pacifism, 
which  indeed  it  was.  Before  the  close  of  the 
eighteenth  century  a  Liberal  newspaper  had  been 
established  by  Mr.  Matthew  Faulkner.  It  was 
called  the  Manchester  Herald^  and  it  made  a 
spirited  defence  of  Liberal  principles  for  about 
eighteen  months,  at  the  end  of  which  period  the 
mob  forcibly  put  it  down  and  wrecked  the 
printing  office  in  Market  Place.  Those  who 
stood  up  for  the  cause  of  the  people  did  well 
in  these  days  to  keep  their  windows  boarded  up. 


15 


§111 

But  a  change  of  opinion  was  coming.  Prices 
were  rising.  Wheat,  which  had  been  6s.  a 
bushel  before  the  war,  was  costing  i6j-.  8^.  a 
bushel  in  i8oi,  and  bread  riots  began  to  occur. 
In  1807  the  famous  Orders  in  Council  declared 
all  the  French  dominions  in  a  state  of  blockade. 
After  the  fashion  of  these  economic  weapons, 
the  measure  proved  rather  sharper  at  the  handle 
than  at  the  point,  and  its  effect  was  the  almost 
complete  destruction  of  our  commerce  abroad. 
The  mercantile  classes  began  to  show  some  un- 
easiness, and  the  Manchester  weavers,  whose 
wages  were  said  to  average  'js.  a  week  in  weeks 
of  full  employment,  took  to  holding  riotous 
meetings  in  favour  of  a  minimum  wage.  At  one 
of  these  meetings  in  St.  George's  Fields  in  1808 
the  4th  Dragoon  Guards  were  called  out,  and 
one  of  the  weavers  was  killed  and  several  wounded. 
Colonel  Hanson,  of  Strangeways  Hall,  the 
"  weavers'  friend,"  an  attractive  though  some- 
what ineffectual  figure,  makes  his  brief  transit 
of  the  public  stage,  and  William  Cobbett  began 
to  teach  a  receptive  people  a  doubtful  political 
economy  in  unexceptionable  English.  In  1812 
the  popular  temper  had  so  far  altered  that  a 
loyal  meeting  called  to  welcome  Castlereagh 
and  Sidmouth  to  high  office  in  the  Government 
provoked  a  counter-demonstration  which,  getting 
out  of  hand,  led  in  its  turn  to  the  sensational 
burning  of  the  Royal  Exchange.  This  incident 
was  taken  as  showing  that  the  days  of  the  "  Church 

16 


and  King  "  mob  were  at  an  end  and  that  the  ice 
which  had  locked  down  every  form  of  dissentient 
political  opinion  was  breaking  up. 

From  this  time  forward  we  begin  to  hear 
the  gathering  voice  of  the  people  ;  some  crying 
one  thing  and  some  another  ;  one  party  calling 
for  factory  legislation ;  another  making  audible 
certain  abstruse  reasons  for  blaming  the  cur- 
rency ;  a  third  busy  night  by  night  breaking 
machinery  and  burning  ricks  ;  yet  another  asking 
already  for  a  repeal  of  the  bread  taxes,  and  a 
small  preoccupied  section  inflamed  chiefly  by 
tithes  and  church  rates,  until  all  these  voices 
joined  and  finally  became  irresistible  in  the 
general  cry  of  the  middle  and  working  class 
for  reform,  the  sine  qua  non  of  every  hope  and 
plan  and  cure  for  the  ills  of  the  times. 

For  the  burning  of  the  Exchange  the  writer 
of  a  placard  "  Now  or  Never  "  which  had  been 
posted  on  the  walls  of  the  town  was  held  chiefly 
responsible.  The  authorship  of  this  manifesto 
was  doubtfully  attributed  to  John  Edward  Taylor, 
now  a  young  man  of  twenty-one,  and  we  shall 
see  this  charge,  repeated  seven  years  later,  giving 
rise  to  a  trial  of  some  importance  to  politics  and 
journalism  at  the  Lancaster  Assizes.  That  the 
placard  should  between  the  years  1812  and  18 19 
have  been  generally  attributed  to  him  in  the  Tory 
gossip  of  the  town  is  an  indication  of  the  rise 
of  his  importance  between  these  two  years. 
New  times  were  coming  and,  with  the  new  times, 
new  men.     The  dynastic  names  of  Philips  and 

17  B 


Potter  and  Greg  and  Absolom  Watkin  and 
Rylands  are  found  occurring  in  the  reported 
transactions  of  the  time.  LiberaHsm  and  Dissent 
were  beginning  to  breed  the  makings  of  the 
Manchester  school  of  poUtics,  and  Unitarianism 
in  particular  was  preparing  to  flower  into  families 
of  powerful  and  accomplished  citizenship.  And 
as  Napoleonic  Manchester  follows  Jacobite  Man- 
chester into  impalpability  and  the  ancestry  of 
modern  men  and  the  origination  of  modern 
things  comes  into  sight  ;  as  the  way,  though 
still  long  and  painful  and  with  Peterloo  a  land- 
mark still  to  be  reached  and  passed,  begins 
nevertheless  to  open  out  towards  enfranchisement 
and  municipalization  ;  as  the  last  reluctant  hand- 
loom  weavers  are  drawn  into  the  factory  system 
— in  this  early  dawn  of  our  own  times,  when 
every  year  saw  some  event,  some  business  founded 
or  some  movement  launched  on  its  way,  which  is 
now  blossoming  into  centenary — in  these  days  of 
small  things  that  were  to  last  and  grow,  we 
find  John  Edward  Taylor  actively  shaping  the 
events  of  his  times  and  town,  and,  what  is  more 
to  the  point,  being  decisively  shaped  by  events 
himself. 

He  was  now  in  business  as  a  Manchester 
merchant  for  himself.  He  lived  in  his  father's 
house  in  Islington  Street,  Salford,  and  addressed 
his  business  lettters  from  Toll  Lane  Buildings, 
but  his  thoughts  were  more  and  more  occupied 
with  the  Whig  politics  of  the  time.  He  had 
found  his  own  means  of  service  to  the  cause  of 

i8 


reform  as  a  pamphleteer.  He  was  the  most 
active  and  industrious  of  a  small  band  of  young 
men  who  seized  on  the  local  journalism  of  Man- 
chester and  made  the  first  beginnings  in  trans- 
forming what  had  been  a  mere  hole-and-corner 
industry  of  scissors  and  paste,  varied  by  an  occa- 
sional antic  of  scurrility,  into  an  instrument  for 
the  systematic  statement  of  views  and  the  winning 
of  purpose. 

The  man  by  whose  goodwill  the  first  experi- 
ments in  pure  journalism  were  made  in  Man- 
chester was  William  Cowdroy.  John  Edward 
Taylor  and  his  friends,  among  whom  we  must 
include  Archibald  Prentice,  the  spiritual  father 
of  the  Manchester  Examiner,  were  now  writing 
articles  week  by  week  in  the  Whig  interest  in 
Cowdroy^s  Manchester  Gazette.  About  the  end 
of  the  eighteenth  and  the  beginning  of  the  nine- 
teenth centuries  Manchester  saw  many  news- 
papers come  and  go.  It  was  one  of  the  signs 
of  ferment.  We  have  seen  how  the  Manchester 
Herald,  established  as  a  Liberal  organ  in  1792, 
was  forcibly  suppressed  by  the  mob  in  the 
following  year.  Another  Radical  paper,  the 
Manchester  Observer,  was  in  existence  in  1 8 1 9, 
and  one  of  its  printers,  Mr.  Saxton,  was  in- 
cluded in  the  band  who  went  to  prison  with 
Henry  Hunt  for  the  affair  of  Peterloo.  Among 
the  Tory  newspapers  of  the  time  we  find  a 
greater  tenacity  of  life.  Wheeler's  Manchester 
Chronicle  and  Harrop's  Mercury,  two  ultra-Tory 
organs,  were  refusing  to  receive  Whig  advertise- 

19 


ments  or  to  print  news  of  the  Whig  party  as  early 
as  1792,  and  were  both  still  in  existence  in 
1825.  In  the  same  proprietorship  with  Harrop's 
Mercury  was  Harrop's  British  Volunteer^  a  paper 
whose  bones  were  afterwards  built,  as  we  shall 
see,  into  the  fabric  of  the  Manchester  Guardian. 
The  Exchange  Herald^  owned  by  an  amiable 
citizen  named  Aston,  ranked  as  a  Conservative 
paper.  It  had,  however,  done  an  important 
service  to  liberty  in  18 10  by  printing  a  letter 
which  helped  materially  to  arouse  Noncon- 
formists to  the  dangers  of  Lord  Sidmouth's 
Dissenters  Bill  and  set  them  petitioning  vigor- 
ously against  a  measure  which,  if  it  had  not  been 
withdrawn,  would  have  required  every  preacher 
not  in  connection  with  the  Established  Church 
to  provide  himself  with  a  testimonial  from  six 
persons  deemed  by  a  magistrate,  who  might  be 
clerically-minded  and  might  even  be  actually  a 
cleric,  to  be  *'  substantial  and  reputable." 

It  was  reserved  to  Cowdroy^s  Manchester 
Gazette  among  this  numerous  band  of  con- 
temporaries to  leave  its  traces  on  the  politics 
and  journalism  of  the  nineteenth  century,  and 
indeed  it  would  be  possible  to  show  that  this 
newspaper  is  the  root  from  which  all  the  sub- 
sequent journalism  of  Manchester  has  directly 
or  derivatively  sprung.  Cowdroy^s  Manchester 
Gazette  began  to  be  published  in  St.  Mary's 
Gate  about  the  year  iJ()Si  ^nd  it  reached  the 
height  of  its  career  about  18 16,  when  William 
Cowdroy,   a   man   of  character   and   wit   and    a 

20 


writer  himself  much  to  the  taste  of  the  town, 
had  begun  to  accept  the  voluntary  assistance 
in  his  columns  of  John  Edward  Taylor,  Archi- 
bald Prentice,  and  others,  and  to  brave  the 
serious  risks  to  which  such  young  men  would  be 
constantly  exposing  him  in  such  times  of  prose- 
cution for  seditious  libel.  *'  Are  you  not  afraid," 
Prentice  once  asked  him,  "  of  an  indictment  for 
this  ?  "  "  Not  I,"  said  Cowdroy  ;  '*  write  away." 
It  was  the  gay,  courageous,  and  liberal  spirit 
of  this  forgotten  worthy,  half-compositor  and 
half-editor,  satirical  writer  who  set  up  his  own 
lampoons  in  type,  which  gave  Manchester  its 
first  experience  of  a  critical,  watchful,  and  out- 
spoken press. 


21 


II  :    THE   BIRTH  OF  A  NEWSPAPER 


CHAPTER     II 

\  The  Birth  of  a  Newspaper 

§1 

THESE  early  beginnings  of  the  local  press  had 
grown  large  enough  by  1819  to  enable  it  to 
play   a   considerable   part   in    the  affair    of 
Peterloo.     If  we  wish  to  reconstruct  the  crime  of 
Peterloo  we  shall  have  to  imagine  a  modern  Whit- 
Monday  on  August    16,  1 8 19.     The  procession 
which  went  through  the  streets  of  Manchester  was 
in  its  Sunday  clothes.     It  included  many  women 
and    children,    and    though    the    object    of   the 
demonstration  was  to  demand  the  extension  of 
the  franchise  the  day  widened  out  into  a  popular 
holiday.     From  early  morning   little  local  pro- 
cessions were  coming  into  Manchester,  tributaries 
of  the  great  stream  of  people  which  ultimately 
went  through  the  streets  with  bands  playing  and 
banners  flying,  and  collected  on  the  site  of  the 
present  Free  Trade  Hall.     We  can  see  how  wide 
a    stretch    of   country    had    drained    itself    into 
Manchester  from  the  circumstance   that  of  the 
persons  killed   by  the  swords  of  the  yeomanry 
only   a   minority   were   actually   of  Manchester, 
the  others  coming  from   Oldham,   Chadderton, 
Saddleworth,  Eccles,   Hyde,   and    Barton.     The 
procession  went  past  the  drawing-room  windows 
of  Mosley  Street,  and  when  it  had  poured  on 
to  the  place  of  meeting  on  St.  Peter's  Field  the 
town  assumed  for  half  an  hour  that  drained  and 

25 


bloodless  aspect  which  is  proper  to  Sunday 
afternoon  but  comes  at  other  times  of  all  the 
circulation  of  the  town  having  rushed  to  one 
place. 

At  the  end  of  this  brief  period  all  the  main 
roads  out  of  Manchester  were  streaming  with 
panic.  A  witness  to  the  events  of  the  day, 
who  did  not  indeed  see  the  central  event  on 
St.  Peter's  Field,  tells  how  he  was  coming  into 
the  town  by  way  of  Chapel  Street,  Salford, 
and  met  people  running  in  the  direction  of 
Pendleton,  "  their  faces  pale  as  death  and  some 
with  blood  trickling  down  their  cheeks."  It 
was  with  difficulty  that  he  could  get  anyone 
to  stop  and  tell  him  what  had  happened. 

It  is  soon  told.  The  magistrates  were  w^atch- 
ing  the  proceedings  from  a  convenient  window. 
They  had  formed  the  decision  to  arrest  Hunt 
in  the  face  of  the  whole  assemblage.  To  assist 
in  this  enterprise  they  had  at  their  command  all 
the  special  constables  of  the  town,  two  hundred 
additional  special  constables  sworn  in  for  the 
occasion,  and  a  mixed  military  force  of  cavalry, 
yeomanry,  artillery,  and  infantry,  w^hich  was 
kept  concealed  behind  a  neighbouring  wall.  It 
is  a  significant  thing  that  the  privilege  of  striking 
the  first  blow  at  the  defenceless  crowd  was  en- 
trusted not  to  the  cavalry  but  to  the  yeomanry, 
which  was  a  local  force  and  was  indeed  the 
quintessence  of  local  Toryism.  The  yeomanry 
drove  their  horses  headlong  into  the  crowd.  The 
crowd  did  not  resist  them,  but  its  great  size  and 

26 


^v* 


r  -Si'''*.-  -♦>-,  ' 


4 


£^^ik^i^:^:'S 


n'-f 


•/. 


X. 


its  inertness  all  but  smothered  them.  In  a  few 
minutes  the  yeomanry  were  no  longer  a  com- 
pact and  concerted  force  but  a  number  of  widely 
divided  men,  stuck  in  the  crowd  like  raisins 
in  a  pudding — blindly  hitting  out.  The  1 5th 
Hussars  were  sent  in  to  their  rescue. 

It  was  soon  over,  and  we  are  now  to  imagine 
St.  Peter's  Field  an  empty  and  deserted  acre, 
strewn  with  caps  and  bonnets  and  hats  and 
Lancashire  shawls  ;  the  dead  lying  about  in 
this  debris  ;  the  yeomanry  dismounted  and  easing 
their  horses'  girths  ;  special  constables  talking 
among  themselves  ;  all  the  blinds  drawn  at 
windows  which  looked  upon  the  scene.  After 
an  attack  with  swords  the  wounded  are  in  a  high 
proportion  to  the  dead.  Eleven  persons  were 
killed.  Some  560  wounded,  of  whom  140  were 
severely  wounded,  came  before  the  committee 
which  raised  a  subscription  for  the  relief  of  suffer- 
ing, and  many  more  nursed  their  broken  heads 
at  home  for  fear  of  confessing  that  they  had 
taken  part  in  a  demonstration  the  object  of  which 
was  to  demand  a  voice  in  the  government  of  the 
country  for  grown  men  and  great  cities. 

Among  the  people  on  the  platform  who  were 
arrested  with  Henry  Hunt  was  a  certain  Mr. 
Tyas,  the  reporter  for  the  Times.  It  was  this 
Mr.  Tyas  who  introduced  into  his  report  of  a 
speech  by  Lord  Brougham  a  long  and  not  in- 
appropriate passage  of  Cicero.  He  meant  it  as 
a  valuable  offering  to  the  great  orator  and  was 
much  surprised  when  Lord  Brougham,  who  had 

27 


not  quoted  the  passage  and  happened  to  be 
unfamihar  with  it,  treated  its  introduction  as  an 
unwarrantable  hberty.  The  Times  was  doing 
great  service  at  this  period  to  the  independence 
of  journaUsm  and  to  the  Liberal  movement, 
and  it  is  evidence  at  once  of  a  high  public  spirit 
and  of  some  professional  enterprise  that  it  should 
have  sent  a  reporter  to  the  meeting  which  was  to 
be  addressed  by  Henry  Hunt.  Peterloo  is  the 
d^but  of  the  reporter  in  English  public  life. 
To  the  local  community  of  the  press  it  was  no 
small  matter  that  the  Times  reporter  had  dropped 
down  among  them,  and  the  full  reports  which 
the  Times  afterwards  gave  of  Hunt's  trial  at 
Lancaster  originated,  through  emulation,  the 
practice  of  the  art  of  reporting  in  Manchester. 
Spending  the  night  of  Peterloo  in  prison,  Mr. 
Tyas  was  momentarily  put  out  of  journalistic 
action,  but  the  account  of  the  affair  which  he 
sent  to  the  Times  on  his  release  and  the  evidence 
he  gave  at  Hunt's  trial  are  important  historical 
testimony  against  the  magistrates.  The  reformers 
greatly  feared  that,  with  Mr.  Tyas  in  prison, 
the  magisterial  party  would  get  the  first  access 
to  the  ear  of  the  country,  and  it  was  in  preventing 
this  calamity  that  the  journalistic  "  hand  "  of 
John  Edward  Taylor  came  into  important  use. 

On  the  evening  of  the  same  day  John  Edward 
Taylor  wTote  a  full  account  of  the  occurrence 
to  a  London  paper.  Archibald  Prentice,  who 
was  not  only  Taylor's  colleague  on  the  Gazette 
but  his  next-door  neighbour  in  Islington  Street, 

28 


Salford,  wrote  a  full  account  for  another  paper. 
Both  narratives  left  Manchester  by  the  night 
coach,  and,  appearing  in  print  within  some  forty- 
eight  hours  of  the  affair,  got  ahead  of  and  were 
never  overtaken  by  the  official  version.  Mr. 
Tyas,  on  his  release,  corroborated  Taylor  and 
Prentice,  and  added  damaging  details  of  his 
own.  Other  newspapers  helped.  Mr.  John 
Smith,  of  the  Liverpool  Mercury^  and  Mr. 
Edward  Baines,  jun.,  of  the  heeds  Mercury^  had 
both  been  present,  and  it  was  mainly  owing  to 
Liberal  journalism  that  Peterloo  brought  a  great 
mass  of  middle-class  and  aristocratic  opinion 
over  to  the  cause  of  reform.  The  magistrates 
and  the  military  might  be  thanked  by  the 
Government  ;  Sidmouth  might  carry  his  '*  Six 
Acts  "  to  stamp  out  sedition  by  dint  of  fine, 
imprisonment,  or  banishment  for  life  ;  the  Rev. 
W.  R.  Hay,  magistrate  and  cleric,  might  receive 
the  living  of  Rochdale  and  its  emoluments  of 
^^2400  a  year  for  his  services  in  "  putting  down  " 
reformers  and  reform.  But  it  was  in  vain. 
Peterloo  brought  the  Reform  Bill  much  nearer. 
It  lifted  the  Whig  party  miles  and  years  on  the 
way  towards  the  combined  triumph  and  collapse 
of  I  832. 

§11 

By  this  time  John  Edward  Taylor  was  con- 
templating and  was  perhaps  preparing  for  the 
establishment  of  a  newspaper  of  his  own.  He 
was  now  literary  man  in  chief  to  the  Whig  party 

29 


of  Manchester.  It  was  he  who  wrote  the  mani- 
festo of  the  party  in  a  pamphlet  which  is  still 
a  standard  authority  for  the  affair  of  Peterloo. 
Still  more  to  the  point,  he  had  already  made 
his  own  journey  along  that  road  to  Lancaster 
which  had  been  trod  by  Thomas  Walker,  Henry 
Hunt,  and  Samuel  Bamford — the  "  Via  Dolo- 
rosa "  of  Lancashire  reformers.  He  had  been  in 
peril  of  the  law.  The  prosecution  of  John 
Edward  Taylor  for  libel  arose  out  of  that  placard 
"Now  or  Never"  which  had  been  thought  the 
immediate  cause  of  the  burning  of  the  Royal 
Exchange  in  i  812.  In  July,  18  18,  there  was  a 
meeting  of  the  police  commissioners  in  Salford 
for  the  purpose  of  appointing  the  assessors,  a 
body  which  performed  certain  rudimentary  duties 
of  local  government.  The  name  of  John  Edward 
Taylor  was  in  the  list  of  eligible  assessors,  and 
when  it  was  reached  a  certain  Mr.  Gill  asked, 
"  Who  is  this  Mr.  Taylor  .?  "  Mr.  John  Green- 
wood, who  appears  to  have  been  presiding,  re- 
plied that  Mr.  Taylor  was  one  of  the  reformers 
who  went  about  the  country  making  speeches. 
Mr.  Joseph  Brotherton,  who  lived  at  this  time 
in  a  country  cottage  in  Oldfield  Lane  but  be- 
came afterwards  the  first  Liberal  member  for 
Salford  and  made  some  figure  in  the  House  of 
Commons,  said  that  Mr.  Taylor  would  not  make 
a  worse  assessor  for  being  a  politician.  If  Mr. 
Taylor  was  a  reformer,  Mr.  Brotherton  added, 
he  was  a  moderate  one.  *'  Moderate  indeed," 
Mr.   Greenwood   replied  ;    '*  he  was  the  author 

30 


of  the  handbill  that  caused  the  Manchester 
Exchange  to  be  set  on  fire  in  1812."  Mr. 
Taylor's  name  was  accordingly  passed  over. 

John  Edward  Taylor  was  greatly  stung  by 
this  attack.  He  made  repeated  applications  to 
Mr.  Greenwood  for  the  withdrawal  of  the 
charge.  He  thought  of  challenging  Mr.  Green- 
wood to  a  duel,  and  finally,  obtaining  no  satis- 
faction, he  wrote  to  Mr.  Greenwood  describing 
him  as  "  a  liar,  a  slanderer,  and  a  scoundrel," 
published  the  letter  by  placing  a  copy  of  it  at 
the  office  of  Cowdrofs  Gazette  for  general  in- 
spection, and  was  as  the  result  indicted  for  a 
criminal  libel  at  the  Lancaster  Assizes  in  March, 
1 8 19,  the  trial  having  been  removed  there  from 
the  Salford  Quarter  Sessions. 

The  trial  at  Lancaster  is  notable  for  the  in- 
road it  made  on  the  doctrine  of  the  courts  that 
the  truth  of  the  statement  complained  of  was 
no  defence  to  an  indictment  for  libel  ;  that  the 
truth  of  the  libel  constituted,  in  fact,  an  aggrava- 
tion of  the  charge.  John  Edward  Taylor 
managed  through  the  vacillation  of  the  counsel 
for  the  prosecution  to  call  evidence  that  Green- 
wood had  in  fact  slandered  him,  and  that  he 
and  not  Greenwood  was  the  person  aggrieved. 
In  a  spirited  address  to  the  jury  he  protested 
against  truth  being  visited  with  the  penalties 
of  falsehood.  With  Baron  Wood  on  the  bench, 
with  Scarlett  (afterwards  Lord  Abinger)  leading 
for  the  prosecution,  and  all  but  a  dozen  loyalists 
in  the  box,  the  defence  would  never  have  worked 

31 


but  for  the  accident  that  John  Rylands,  of 
Warrington,  was  the  foreman  of  the  jury.  John 
Rylands  prevented  the  jury  from  giving  a  ver- 
dict without  leaving  the  box.  He  insisted  on 
retiring.  He  kept  the  jury  in  retirement  so  long 
that  when  the  verdict  was  at  length  agreed  on 
it  had  to  be  communicated  to  the  judge  in  bed. 
John  Edward  Taylor  had  been  attended  all  day 
by  a  band  of  devoted  friends.  One  of  them 
described  the  procession  of  the  jury,  the  janitors, 
the  prisoner,  the  prisoner's  friends  through  the 
narrow  streets  of  Lancaster  to  the  judge's  lodg- 
ings on  a  windy  night  ;  the  lantern  going  on 
ahead  ;  the  squeezing  of  the  whole  crowd  into 
a  moderate-sized  bedroom  ;  the  judge  in  bed  ; 
the  judge's  nightcap. 

John  Rylands  pronounced  the  verdict.  If 
he  had  not  out-argued  the  jury  he  had  out- 
stayed them  and  out-starved  them.  The  ver- 
dict was  "  Not  guilty."  The  room,  the  lobby 
outside  the  room,  the  staircase  and  the  street 
outside  rang  with  the  cheers  of  Taylor's  friends. 
The  next  morning  he  was  formally  acquitted 
in  court,  and  he  left  Lancaster  about  noon  on 
his  return  to  Manchester.  One  of  his  attendants 
to  Lancaster  had  been  Mr.  John  Childs,  of 
Bungay,  in  the  county  of  Suffolk,  a  printer  and 
a  personage  in  the  history  of  Bible  printing. 
He  was  not  so  much  a  friend  of  Mr.  Taylor's 
as  a  friend  of  a  friend,  but  he  had  got  into  the 
inner  ring  of  the  affair  and  was  contributing 
much  in  admiration  and  sympathy.     "  It  is  now 

32 


plain,"  the  enthusiastic  Mr.  Childs  said  to  Mr. 
Taylor  in  the  coach  on  the  way  home,  *'  it  is  now 
plain  you  have  the  elements  of  public  work  in 
you  ;  why  don't  you  set  up  a  newspaper  ?  "  To 
these  words  the  Manchester  Guardian  owes  its 
birth. 

The  project  matured  for  two  years,  and 
while  it  was  maturing  John  Edward  Taylor 
abandoned  the  idea  he  had  been  entertaining 
of  going  to  the  Bar.  The  proprietors  of  the 
Leeds  Mercury  and  the  Liverpool  Mercury  were 
consulted,  and  were  found  full  of  encouragement 
and  hope.  Cowdroy^s  Gazette  was  known  by 
now  to  draw  much  of  its  value  from  the  part 
which  John  Edward  Taylor  was  gratuitously 
taking  in  its  columns,  and  for  a  time  it  seemed 
probable  that  Cowdroy's  might  be  purchased  and 
made  worthier  of  the  growing  party  of  Whigs 
and  Reformers  and  of  the  "  populous  and  in- 
telligent district,"  as  Mr.  Taylor  put  it,  "  in 
which  we  are  situated."  But  Mr.  Cowdroy 
refused  to  sell,  and  the  project  for  establishing 
an  entirely  new  paper  was  resumed.  In  the 
end  the  sum  of  ^^looo  was  raised  in  more  or  less 
equal  contributions  by  some  twelve  friends  of 
Mr.  Taylor,  all  of  them  Whigs  and  Reformers 
and  most  of  them  Unitarians,  and  this  sum  formed 
the  capital  on  which  the  Manchester  Guardian 
began  its  career.  The  money  was  subscribed 
under  an  agreement  that  if  the  experiment  failed 
each  of  the  twelve  contributors  was  to  regard 
his    subscription   as   lost  ;    if  it  succeeded   each 


was  to  be  repaid.  The  agreement  was  credit- 
able to  all  parties  and  it  was  faithfully  observed. 
But  there  is  no  doubt  that  while  the  bargain 
gave  a  decisive  turn  to  John  Edward  Taylor's 
career  and  carried  him  out  of  business  into  pro- 
fessional journalism,  its  precise  terms  determined 
also  to  some  extent  the  kind  of  journalist  he  was 
to  be.  He  was  anxious  to  justify  the  confidence 
of  his  friends,  and  in  the  effort  to  do  this  he  be- 
came much  more  absorbed  than  had  been  ex- 
pected in  the  technique  of  journalism.  Some  of 
his  backers  expected  a  weekly  tract  for  the  times. 
They  got,  instead,  a  tractarianism  much  milder 
than  that  which  continued  to  issue  week  by  week 
from  the  office  of  the  Gazette,  But  with  it  they 
obtained  much  the  best  newspaper  Manchester 
had  yet  known.  It  had  been  usual  in  the  Man- 
chester papers  to  dismiss  the  most  important 
meeting  in  a  paragraph — "  A  large  meeting  was 
held  in  the  Bull's  Head  on  Thursday  last,  for  the 
resolutions  of  which  see  advertisement  in  our 
front  page."  The  Guardian  was  the  first  paper 
in  Manchester  to  employ  a  professional  reporter 
who  performs  the  characteristic  functions  of 
journalism.  It  was  less  shrill  than  the  current 
journalism  of  the  town  and  more  orchestrated. 
The  prospectus,  which  is  from  the  hand  of  John 
Edward  Taylor,  and  a  favourable  example  of 
English  prose  as  it  was  the  day  after  Gibbon  and 
the  day  but  one  after  Johnson,  promises  that  the 
accompaniment  to  the  main  political  theme  of 
journalism   shall   not   be   neglected,   and   that   it 

34 


will  indeed  be  somewhat  developed  by  systematic 
attention  to  literature  and  science,  by  foreign 
intelligence,  and  what  we  might  call  the  secular 
news  of  the  town  and  district. 

§111 

We  need  constantly  to  correct  our  perspective 
in  taking  the  account  of  past  times  from  the 
historian.  If  we  forgot  to  do  this  we  should 
suppose  that  human  life  in  Manchester  from 
1 82 1  till  1846  consisted  in  nothing  but  violently 
rushing  to  and  fro,  in  assembling  or  dispersing, 
in  being  furiously  a  Whig  or  a  Tory  or  a  Cobden- 
ite,  as  the  case  may  be.  But  this  is  a  mistake, 
and  on  all  except  perhaps  twenty-five  days  at  the 
most  in  those  twenty-five  years  the  ordinary 
people  of  Manchester  were  probably  as  little 
conscious  of  the  beat  and  rhythm  of  public  his- 
tory as  the  little  fishes  we  see  on  the  surface  of  the 
river  are  aware  that  they  are  living  in  flowing 
water,  and  that  the  rapids  are  just  round  the  bend 
in  the  journey  and  experience  of  the  stream. 

It  is  true  the  Corn  Law  of  18 15  imposed 
throughout  this  period  a  ceaseless  pressure  on 
the  growing  frame  of  the  town,  but  society, 
like  the  individual,  has  a  private  life  which  con- 
tinues in  almost  any  state  of  politics.  In  the 
darkest  political  days  of  the  early  nineteenth 
century  Edmund  Kean  is  acting  Othello  or 
Sir  Giles  Overreach,  and  William  Hazlitt  lectur- 
ing on  poetry,  and  the  audiences  assisting  at 
these  events  are  large.     George  IV  sets  a  per- 

35 


plexing  new  fashion  of  sea-bathing  and  in  Man- 
chester people  begin  to  go  by  coach  to  South- 
port  to  indulge  this  strange  new  fad,  the  journey 
occupying  five  hours.  "  The  Rivals  "  is  given 
at  the  Theatre  Royal  to  introduce  Mrs.  Davison, 
Mr.  Johnstone,  and  Mr.  W.  Farren,  but  *'  the 
house  was  not  so  full  as  might  have  been  ex- 
pected from  the  celebrity  of  these  performers." 
The  Guardian  is  somewhat  severe  on  the  per- 
formance submitted  by  "  Mr.  F."  It  is  believed 
in  Scottish  literary  circles  that  "  Mrs.  Grant,  the 
author  of  Letters  from  the  Mountains^  is  also  the 
author  of  Waverley  and  other  fashionable  novels 
so  generally  ascribed  to  Sir  Walter  Scott."  The 
Guardian  places  before  its  readers  some  of  the 
evidence  adduced  in  support  of  this  theory,  but 
does  not  commit  itself  either  way.  "  On  Monday 
evening  a  young  man  passing  down  the  narrow 
part  of  Market  Street  was  very  severely  injured 
by  being  crushed  between  the  wall  and  the 
wheel  of  a  carrier's  cart."  A  few  days  later 
the  bells  of  the  Collegiate  Church  are  rung  all 
through  Thursday  in  honour  of  the  passing  of 
the  Manchester  Streets  Bill,  which  will  empower 
the  town  to  widen  Market  Street  and  so  prevent 
such  dreadful  accidents  for  the  future.  So  life 
proceeds,  beyond  the  power  of  politics  to  hinder 
or  help  ! 

Even  in  its  earliest  numbers  we  see  the  editor 
of  the  Guardian  trying  to  be  more  things  to 
more  men  than  Mr.  Harrop  ever  attempted 
to  be  in  the  Mercury^  which  was  often  little  more 

36 


than  scraps  of  transplanted  poetry  and  the  local 
dog  fights,  or  than  Mr.  Cowdroy  had  thought  it 
his  journalistic  duty  to  be  in  the  Gazette.  We 
begin  through  the  Guardian  to  hear  the  speaker 
at  the  meeting  and  to  see  the  actor  on  the  stage. 
We  are  with  the  prisoner  at  his  trial,  and  not 
infrequently,  in  the  hard  spirit  of  the  age,  we 
accompany  him  with  glued  eyes  every  inch  of 
the  way  to  the  scaffold.  We  read  that  a  certain 
prisoner  has,  owing  to  the  special  and  peculiar 
quality  of  her  crime,  to  be  dragged  to  the  place 
of  execution  on  a  hurdle,  and  as  she  approaches 
the  end  of  her  journey  her  cries  are  so  sustained 
and  shrill  that  every  countenance  in  the  large 
company  of  spectators  "  is  struck  into  an  aspect 
of  dismay."  The  thing  begins  to  be  a  mirror 
of  the  times.  It  was,  again,  much  the  hand- 
somest paper  that  had  come  out  of  the  town. 
We  find  it  almost  from  the  beginning  climbing 
on  to  the  knee  of  the  cotton  trade  and  talking, 
again,  about  the  currency  which  was  being  much 
injured  by  the  issue  of  local  notes,  and  whereas 
Mr.  Wheeler  of  the  Chronicle  would  not  look  at 
an  advertisement  after  one  o'clock  on  Friday, 
the  Guardian  obliged  the  public  by  accepting 
revenue  until  the  very  moment  of  going  to  press. 
From  this  time  forward  the  life  of  John  Edward 
Taylor  belongs  much  more  to  journalism  and 
much  less  to  politics.  His  opinions  did  not 
change  and  he  remained  a  moderate  Whig, 
though  he  is  said  to  have  become  in  later  life 
a  Malthusian  and,  like  most  of  the  early  Mal- 

37 


thuslans,  to  have  largely  given  up  hope.  Archi- 
bald Prentice,  who  also  began  a  public  career 
by  writing  for  Coicdroy's  Gazette,  and  who  was 
to  spend  a  literary  lifetime  in  the  service  first  of 
reform  and  afterwards  of  the  League,  blames 
his  early  friend  severely  for  an  increasing  ab- 
sorption in  the  temporalities  of  journalism,  and 
deplores  the  speedy  gravitation  of  the  Guardian 
from  "  the  Left  "  in  politics  to  a  position  near 
to  *'  the  Centre,"  and  not  always  clearly  distin- 
guishable from  "  the  Right."  He  complains  of 
too  much  "  management  "  of  public  questions 
and  a  certain  "  steersmanship."  But  the  drama 
is  not  in  three  acts  or  even  in  five.  The  services 
which  the  Manchester  Guardian  was  able  to  render 
in  later  years  to  the  minority  in  English  politics 
would  not  have  been  performed  with  so  much 
effect,  and  perhaps  could  not  have  been  per- 
formed at  all,  if  it  had  not  been  deeply  versed 
in  the  full  technique  of  journalism,  a  powerful, 
efficient,  and  familiar  newspaper,  trusted  un- 
reservedly for  the  facts.  It  began  to  acquire 
this  character  and  to  build  it  up  under  the 
cautious,  catholic,  unsensational  editorship  of 
John  Edward  Taylor.  First  the  natural  body 
and  then  the  spiritual  ! 


38 


Ill :  IN  THE  DATS  OF  SMALL  THINGS 


CHAPTER      III 

In  the  TDays  of  Small  Thifigs 

§1 

THE  Manchester  Guardian  of  May  5,  1821, 
was  a  four-page  paper  of  24  columns.  It 
appeared  once  a  week,  went  to  press  on 
Friday  evening,  and  was  formally  issued  to  the 
world  on  Saturday.  Its  most  striking  physical 
feature  was  the  crimson  Revenue  stamp  impressed 
in  the  top  right-hand  corner  of  its  front  page. 
The  stamp  was  an  object  not  undecorative  in  itself, 
but  it  indicated,  especially  when  we  remember 
that  there  was  in  addition  to  it  an  unseen  but 
potent  tax  of  3^.  dd,  on  each  advertisement  and 
a  duty  of  3^.  a  pound  on  paper,  a  severe  drag 
on  the  possible  commercial  progress  of  the  under- 
taking. It  was  the  Revenue  stamp  which  entered 
most  heavily  into  the  price  of  the  paper.  Of 
the  'jd.  charged  for  each  copy  \d.  was  paid  to 
the  Government  as  a  tax  on  knowledge. 

The  Guardian  appeared  when  the  newspaper 
tax  stood  at  the  highest  point  it  ever  reached. 
It  had  been  imposed  at  a  lower  rate  in  the  reign 
of  Queen  Anne  as  an  instrument  for  the  repression 
of  troublesome  opinion,  and  both  Addison  and 
Swift  mention  the  heavy  mortality  it  caused 
among  the  newspapers  of  their  day.  When  it 
was  lowered  to  a  penny  in  1836  and  finally 
abolished  in  1855  ^^  deportment  of  society 
towards    the    newspaper    underwent    a    marked 

41 


change.  An  etiquette  disappeared.  The  stamped 
newspaper  was  a  means  of  social  ceremony  and 
obligation.  Not  many  people  had  it,  and  the 
man  who  owned  it,  owned  it  to  some  extent  for 
the  benefit  of  his  neighbours,  even  as  a  man 
might  own  a  watering-can  or  a  pair  of  step- 
ladders  or  any  other  article  of  occasional  utility 
for  which  he  gets  known  over  his  garden  wall. 
People  presented  their  compliments  to  one  an- 
other and  begged  to  be  favoured  with  a  few 
moments'  loan  of  the  Gazette  or  the  Dispatch. 
Being  borrowed,  it  was  duly  returned,  or  it  was 
passed  on  by  consent  to  another  applicant,  but 
the  air  and  aspect  of  a  private  estate  which  have 
evaporated  out  of  any  morning  newspaper  of 
to-day  by  the  time  the  sun  has  reached  its  noon- 
day height  would  easily  hang  for  a  week  about 
the  old  journal  which  came  down  from  London 
by  the  Rocket  and  contained  an  important  speech 
by  Sir  Robert  or  Lord  John.  It  was  property. 
The  owner  had  what  the  lawyers  call  constructive 
possession  of  it  even  when  it  was  out  of  his  hands. 
A  letter  written  by  a  Nonconformist  minister  in 
1 83  I  may  be  quoted  for  its  illustration  of  a  kind 
of  finesse,  stylishness,  and  we  might  say  virtuosity 
as  of  a  man  tasting  claret,  which  is  now  hopelessly 
lost  to  the  process  and  occupation  of  reading  the 
news  of  the  day,  as  well  for  the  somewhat  beauti- 
ful light  it  throws  on  the  deliberate  habits  of  an 
age  which  was  vanishing  even  as  he  wrote. 

I  was  very  glad,  he  says,  to  find  that  you  enjoyed 
your  excursion  to  Manchester  by  the  steam  carriage. 

42 


What  a  delightful  mode  of  travelling  it  is  I  You 
had  150  fellow-passengers,  I  find.  What  a  number 
to  travel  by  the  same  carriage  1  What  eventful  times 
have  I  lived  to  see  1  Such  a  plan  of  Parliamentary 
reform  I  never  expected  to  see  submitted  to  Parlia- 
ment by  any  ministry  as  that  proposed  by  Lord  John 
Russell  this  day  week.  Mr.  Edward  Carter  was  so 
good  as  to  send  me  over  the  Morning  Chronicle.  I 
found  it  on  my  table  when  I  returned  home  to  tea 
with  a  message  that  I  would  return  it  when  I  had  done 
with  it.  I  accordingly  read  the  leading  article  con- 
taining the  outlines  of  the  plan,  and  then  hastily 
looked  over  Lord  John  Russell's  speech.  When  I 
returned  it,  I  borrowed  it  again  the  next  morning  to 
look  at  it  more  leisurely,  and  then  sent  it  on  to  Dr. 
Waller,  requesting  him  to  return  it  to  Mr.  Carter. 

Stamps  here  and  duties  there  were  not  the 
only  difficulties  in  the  way  of  the  new  enterprise. 
As  a  Liberal  organ  it  was  born  to  trouble  as  the 
sparks  flew  upwards.  The  Government  which 
fleeced  also  frowned.  A  Liberal  editor  edited 
with  the  Attorney-General  at  his  elbow,  and, 
lest  the  Attorney-General  should  slumber  and 
sleep,  there  was  the  London  Constitutional  Asso- 
ciation, a  body  of  amateur  censors,  on  the  watch. 
Finally,  the  Guardian  had  its  own  private  and 
peculiar  difficulty  in  the  fierce  journalistic  com- 
petition which  was  raging  in  the  town.  The 
"  sevenpenny  "  public  has  its  definite  boundaries 
even  to-day,  but  one  hundred  years  ago  it  was 
extremely  limited,  and  the  '*  sevenpenny  "  public 
was  already  staked  out  among  no  fewer  than  seven 
newspapers,  large  and  small.  Wheeler's  Chronicle, 
with  a  circulation   of  at  least   3000  and  secure 

43 


of  the  advertising  goodwill  of  the  town,  was  the 
Goliath  of  this  host. 

But  there  were  two  departments  of  journalism 
in  which  practically  nothing  had  as  yet  been 
done.  The  one  was  that  of  the  leader-writer, 
and  the  other  that  of  the  reporter.  For  foreign 
intelligence  and  for  the  speeches  in  Parliament 
the  Guardian  was  dependent,  like  all  its  rivals, 
on  its  own  scissors  and  paste  and  the  London 
papers — the  Morning  Post,  which  Coleridge  had 
recently  been  making  glorious  ;  the  Times,  a 
strong  Liberal  paper  in  those  days  ;  and  the 
brilliant  Morning  Chronicle,  which  was  so  often 
in  trouble  for  sedition  that  it  w^as  almost  edited 
from  Newgate.  For  district  news,  again,  by 
which  term  we  should  understand  news  from  the 
towns  around  Manchester,  it  was  necessary  to 
look  to  voluntary  contributions,  and  we  find  the 
editor  begging  in  his  prospectus  to  be  furnished 
with  paragraphs  of  local  interest.  The  things 
which  were  special  and  peculiar  to  the  Guardian 
for  the  present  were  the  literary  character  of 
John  Edward  Taylor  and  the  shorthand  which 
Jeremiah  Garnett  had  invented  while  acting  as  a 
printer  on  Wheeler's  Chronicle. 

John  Edward  Taylor  was  the  first  newspaper 
proprietor  in  Manchester  who  was  capable  of 
acting  as  his  own  editor,  and  the  first  editor  in 
the  town  who  could  write.  Some  attempt  had 
been  made,  as  we  have  seen,  and  chiefly  by  Mr. 
Taylor  himself,  to  develop  the  leading  article  in 
Cowdroy's  Gazette.     Mr.  Wheeler  and  Mr.  Har- 

44 


rop,  on  their  parts,  despised  it.  Even  in  the 
Guardian  it  was  some  years  before  it  acquired 
its  full  modern  sacrosanctity.  In  the  early  num- 
bers we  find  it  abbreviated  and  even  on  occasion 
omitted  for  want  of  space.  It  is  more  shocking 
to  find  it  now  and  then  unwritten  for  want  of 
time,  and  to  catch  the  editor  signing  promissory 
notes  to  deal  with  something  or  other  "  next 
week."  Many  years  later — in  the  days  when  the 
Anti-Corn  Law  League  had  nearly  won  but  not 
quite,  and  the  Free  Trade  Hall  was  being  thrown 
together  with  nails  and  timber  so  that  the  great 
argument  could  be  heard  argued  out,  and  the 
opening  speeches  of  chairmen  were  stopped  while 
the  workmen  wrenched  boards  from  the  roof  for 
air  and  breathing — in  those  missionary  days  the 
Guardian  would  allow  itself  from  time  to  time 
to  be  literally  swamped  by  the  eloquence  of 
Cobden  and  Bright,  and  the  leading  article  would 
be  held  over  for  want  of  space  if  not  of  breath. 
This  was  not  good  journalism,  but  it  was  ex- 
ceptional. From  the  first  the  leading  article 
was  a  feature  of  the  Guardian,  a  new  entertain- 
ment and  a  new  force  in  the  politics  and  journal- 
ism of  the  town.  The  other  art  by  which  the 
paper  hoped  to  make  its  way  was  that  of  the 
reporter.  No  other  paper  in  the  town  had  a 
reporter.  The  Guardian  introduced  him  and 
his  function  into  the  life  of  Manchester.  It  in- 
troduced him  in  the  person  of  Jeremiah  Garnett. 
The  first  number  of  the  Guardian  announces 
that   the   paper  is   "  printed   and   published    by 

45 


J.  Garnett  at  No.  29,  Market  Street."  This  is 
not  to  be  taken  as  a  legal  fiction  but  as  a  fact. 
Garnett  combined  the  three  functions  of  printer, 
business  manager,  and  reporter.  As  the  week 
went  on  he  turned  his  own  shorthand  notes  of 
meetings  into  type,  cutting  out  altogether  the 
intermediate  process  of  translating  shorthand  into 
longhand,  and  when  the  paper  was  printed  on 
Friday  it  was  he  who  took  off  his  jacket  and 
turned  the  handle  of  the  press.  We  must  go 
back  a  little  to  introduce  Jeremiah  Garnett 
properly  to  the  stage  of  public  life  in  Manchester. 
He  was  the  son  of  a  certain  William  Garnett, 
a  paper  manufacturer  of  Otley,  and  was  the 
youngest  of  three  brothers  who  mastered  many 
languages  and  sciences  and  rose  by  dint  of  this 
zeal  for  self-improvement  to  be  men  of  mark, 
one  of  them  in  the  Church,  another  in  commerce 
at  Clitheroe,  and  the  third  in  journalism,  the 
three  together  giving  the  family  a  name  for 
learning  and  scholarship  which  was  further  im- 
proved in  the  generation  which  followed  them 
by  Dr.  Richard  Garnett,  of  the  British  Museum. 
Jeremiah  was  born  in  1793,  and,  having  been 
apprenticed  to  a  printer  at  Barnsley,  joined  the 
service  of  Wheeler  s  Manchester  Chronicle  in  1 8 14. 
John  Edward  Taylor  invited  him  to  assist  in 
the  establishment  of  the  Manchester  Guardian^ 
with  the  standing  of  a  junior  partner.  His 
abilitv  as  a  practical  printer  was  such  that  in 
1828  he  devised,  with  some  expert  assistance,  a 
machine  which  raised   the  rate  of  printing  the 

46 


paper  from  300  to  1500  copies  in  the  hour. 
In  later  years  his  work  was  definitely  literary 
and  editorial,  and  it  was  indeed,  as  we  shall  see, 
under  his  editorship  that  the  paper  stood  for 
some  years  rather  by  Palmerston  than  by  Bright. 
His  career  furnishes  a  curious  example  of  great 
determination,  loyalty,  and  fervency  in  a  strictly 
moderate  position. 

In  the  early  career  of  Jeremiah  Garnett  we 
find  some  difficulty  in  separating  his  various 
functions  as  practical  printer,  business  manager, 
and  reporter.  But  it  is  nothing  to  the  confusion 
which  is  caused  by  his  having  been  at  once  a 
reporter  and  a  public  man.  When  Dr.  Johnson 
was  reporting  the  debates  in  Parliament  there 
was  always  the  opportunity  to  make  the  Whig 
dogs  have  the  worst  of  it.  It  was  a  temptation, 
and  Dr.  Johnson  succumbed  to  it.  Garnett  was 
under  a  more  severe  temptation  still.  He  re- 
ported himself,  and,  even  more  to  the  point,  he 
reported  his  antagonist.  He  was  an  extremely 
active  man  of  affairs.  In  1838  he  and  John 
Edward  Taylor  were  added,  in  the  distinguished 
company  of  Richard  Cobden,  to  the  Anti-Corn 
Law  Association,  when  that  body  was  but  a 
week  old.  He  was  a  member  of  the  Manchester 
City  Council.  This  was  later.  In  the  romantic 
morning  of  his  career  his  main  interests  were  in 
the  parochial  politics  of  the  vestry  and  the  street 
commissioners.  In  these  dark  and  devious  ways 
he  knew  every  inch  of  the  ground.  He  took 
a  keen  interest  in  the  parish  pump,  which  was 

47 


Indeed  often  stopped  up.  He  was  prominent 
at  meetings  of  the  '*  ley-payers,"  and  excelled 
in  the  hostile  and  pessimistic  examination  of  the 
churchwardens'  accounts. 

At  these  meetings  Mr.  Garnett  is  to  be 
imagined  fighting  the  battle  of  pure  finance 
with  sword  and  trowel,  arraigning  the  church- 
warden and,  at  the  close  of  his  own  fluent  periods, 
seizing  his  pencil  to  take  down  the  church- 
warden's reply.  He  can  have  known  no  rest. 
In  the  strain  of  this  somewhat  unnatural  situation, 
his  reports  frequently  passed  beyond  the  sphere 
of  mere  record  and  became  descriptive,  com- 
mentatory,  and  highly  partisan.  He  was  fond 
of  expressing  a  sort  of  sotto  voce  opinion  within 
brackets.  Thus,  he  interrupts  his  report  of  the 
speech  of  an  opponent  to  make  the  reflection 
that  while  the  orators  of  antiquity  wrote  their 

speeches   Mr.   goes   one   better   and    reads 

his  from  a  printed  copy,  and  reads  it  so  fast 
that  no  one,  and  certainly  not  Jeremiah  Garnett, 
can  possibly  take  it  down.  Another  member  of 
the  opposite  party  having  alleged  that  the  best 
point  was  left  out  of  his  speech  in  the  Guardian  s 
report  of  the  last  meeting,  Mr.  Garnett  places 
the  complaint  on  record,  and  appears  again 
between  his  brackets,  putting  out  his  head  to 
assure  us  that  it  shall  not  occur  again.  In  future 
his  readers  will  learn   how   *'  at   this  point   Mr. 

sagaciously  shook  his  head,"  or  how  "  Mr. 

at  this  point  drew  from  his  fob  his  watch 

(gold,  silver,  or  pinchbeck,  as  the  case  may  be) 

48 


JOHN    i:i)\\.\Kl)     lANl.OR, 
l-oiiiulcr  .niil    lirsi    Kdiior   of   ili.-    M nihlicslrr   Ctmiilimi.      Uuvn    17!ll  :    <li.il    1,-U. 


and,  looking  at  his  watch  with  lack-lustre  eye, 
said  very  wisely  '  It  is  ten  o'clock.'  "  He  then 
becomes  serious  again,  and,  beginning  with  the 
words  "  Mr.  Garnett  said,"  gives  a  workman- 
like and,  we  should  say,  comprehensive  sum- 
mary of  his  own  contribution  to  the  debate. 
He  stood  up  stoutly  for  the  right  of  the  press 
to  be  present  at  coroners'  inquests,  and  carried 
a  case  on  this  point  against  the  coroner  to  the 
King's  Bench,  when  he  lost,  at  an  expense  to 
the  paper  of  ^C^SO-  When  the  press  finally 
secured  the  legal  right  of  admittance  he  attended 
the  first  open  sitting  and  had  his  revenge  on  the 
coroner  in  a  footnote  to  his  report. 

§n 

The  paper  which  issued  in  1821  from  the 
ofhce  at  the  corner  of  Market  Street  and  New 
Cannon  Street  was  thus  rich  in  native  ability, 
but  not,  at  the  moment,  in  anything  else.  It 
was  laboriously  printed  by  hand.  The  Stan- 
hope press  turned  out  at  first  only  two  hundred 
impressions  of  a  single  side  in  an  hour,  and  twice 
that  time  was  consequently  needed  to  produce 
two  hundred  perfected  copies.  Its  foreign  news 
was  all  of  it  at  least  ten  days  old,  and,  though 
published  on  Saturday,  it  did  not  manage  to 
bring  its  Parliamentary  report  beyond  the  pre- 
ceding Wednesday  night.  Among  its  items  of 
foreign  news  was  a  favourable  account  of  the 
health  of  Napoleon  Bonaparte,  whose  death  had 
occurred  before  the  words  could  be  read.     It  was 

49  -       i> 


not  until  July  that  news  of  Napoleon's  death 
reached  the  English  press,  the  Guardian  reporting 
it  unofficially  on  July  7  and  officially  on  July  14, 
when  it  added  a  list  of  the  principal  dates  in  his 
life,  a  predecessor  of  the  modern  obituary  notice. 

The  first  number  contained  forty-seven  adver- 
tisements.    One  of  them  announces  that  a  private 
house  is  to  be  let  in  Brazennose  Street.     Another 
one  shows  us  that   the   present  wide  reputation 
of  Ancoats  has  all  been  won  in  less  than  a  hundred 
years.     *'  Ancoats   Hall,"    it    says,    "  to   let,    to- 
gether," it  adds  curtly,  "  with  extensive  gardens 
and  pleasure  grounds,  stocked  with  choice  fruit 
trees  in  full  bearing."     An  advertisement  is  not 
always  strictly  true,  but  its  inaccuracy  is  circum- 
scribed by  very  definite  limits,  and  we  can  but 
bow  the   head    before   this  staggering   assertion. 
A    description    of  a    "  missing    gentleman  "    has 
some    historical    value.      It    is    evident    that    he 
was  badly  wanted,  for  the  advertisement  is  re- 
peated, but  no  one  seems  to  have  seen  the  figure 
in  the  "  black  coat  and  waistcoat,  blue  trousers, 
and  Wellington  boots,  with  a  green  silk  umbrella," 
who  thus  flashes  across  the  stage  of  life  and  makes 
his    exit    two    miles    from    Manchester    on    the 
Cheetham    Hill    Road.     Among    the    items    of 
local  news  there  is  an  agreeable  account  of  the 
conduct  of  a  colony  of  rooks  which  had  lately 
established  itself  '*  in  a  garden  at  the  top  of  King 
Street."    Jackdaws,    says    Mr.    Garnett,    whose 
hand    can    be    traced    in    this    paragraph,    were 
also    present.     The    second    number,    issued    on 

50 


May  12,  contains  the  savage  intelligence  that 
Mary  Slater  (aged  33)  has  been  sentenced  at 
the  Quarter  Sessions  to  transportation  for  four- 
teen years  for  stealing  a  watch,  a  handkerchief, 
and  twenty-six  shillings.  The  *'  Births,  Mar- 
riages, and  Deaths  "  column  began  with  the 
first  number,  but  until  the  society  of  the  town 
had  been  taught  to  use  it — and  perhaps  to  help 
in  teaching  them — it  was  largely  compiled  from 
the  fashionable  news  of  the  London  papers. 
The  column  announces,  for  example,  the  death, 
at  Clifton,  of  Mrs.  Piozzi,  who  as  Mrs.  Thrale 
figures  conspicuously  in  Boswell's  Life  of  'John- 
son. 

The  first  public  question  we  find  agitated 
in  the  Guardian  arose  out  of  George  IV's  quarrel 
with  his  wife,  which  reached  the  height  of 
scandal  when  the  Queen  was  refused  her  crown- 
ing in  Westminster  Abbey,  as  she  had  already 
been  shut  out  of  the  pages  of  the  Prayer-book. 
The  Guardian  had  all  the  Whig  and  Liberal 
sentiment  for  the  Queen.  It  appeared  in  black 
for  the  first  time  for  this  same  Caroline  of  Bruns- 
wick when  she  died  a  few  days  after  the  affair 
of  the  Coronation,  and  when  the  Government 
ordered  her  body  to  be  taken  round  the  suburbs 
of  London  on  its  way  to  Harwdch  for  fear  of 
trouble  in  the  City,  the  Guardian  published  its 
first  map,  showing  the  circuitous  and  clandestine 
route. 

Coronation   Day   in    Manchester   called    forth 
the  first  strong  interference  of  the  Guardian  in 

51 


local  affairs.  A  passage  which  is  to  be  found  in 
an  issue  of  July  1821,  announces  that  the  social 
conscience — often  called  in  later  days  the  Non- 
conformist conscience — is  awakening  on  a  subject 
about  which  opinion  had  been  fast  asleep.  The 
paper  had  been  describing  the  procession  round 
the  town  when  the  passage  opens. 

Here  we  should  have  been  glad  to  close  our  ac- 
count of  the  proceedings  of  the  day,  but  we  have  a 
further  duty  to  discharge — unpleasant  and  perhaps 
invidious.  About  five  o'clock  commenced  the  dis- 
tribution of  meat  and  beer  to  the  populace.  The 
stations  for  this  were — the  New  Market,  Shudehill  ; 
the  Shambles  at  Bank  Top  ;  those  at  the  top  of 
Bridge  Street  ;  in  Campfield  Market  ;  the  George 
and  Dragon,  Ardwick  ;  the  Clarendon  Public  House, 
Chorlton  Row  ;  in  Hulme,  in  Strangeways,  in 
Motram's  Field,  and  in  Oldfield  Road.  At  many, 
we  fear  we  may  say  most,  of  these  places  scenes  were 
exhibited  which  even  the  pencil  of  a  Hogarth  would 
fail  to  pourtray.  At  the  New  Market,  Shudehill, 
the  meat  and  loaves  were  thrown  out  high  from  the 
doors  and  windows  of  the  warehouse  where  they  had 
been  stored  ;  the  populace  scrambling  for  them  as 
they  could.  It  resembled  the  throwing  of  goods  out 
of  the  windows  of  a  warehouse  on  fire  rather  than 
anything  else  we  can  compare  it  to.  There  was 
shameful  waste  and  general  confusion.  At  an  early 
hour  the  stage  erected  for  the  applicants  to  stand 
upon  gave  way,  and  one  person  was  killed  and  several 
dangerously  wounded  by  the  fall. 

When  the  liquor  was  distributing  we  saw  whole 
pitchers  thrown  indiscriminately  among  the  crowd — 
men  holding  up  their  hats  to  receive  drink  ;  people 
quarrelling  and  fighting  for  the  possession  of  a  jug  ; 

52 


the  strong  taking  liquor  from  the  weak  ;  boys  and 
girls,  men  and  women,  in  a  condition  of  beastly 
drunkenness,  staggering  before  the  depository  of  ale 
or  lying  prostrate  on  the  ground  under  every  variety 
of  circumstance  and  in  every  degree  of  exposure, 
swearing,  groaning,  vomiting,  but  calling  for  more 
liquor  when  they  could  not  stand  or  even  sit  to  drink 
it.  Every  kind  of  excess,  indeed,  which  the  most 
fertile  imagination  can  conceive  or  the  most  graphic 
pen  describe  was  there  witnessed  in  nauseous  and 
loathsome  extravagance.  Never  did  we  see,  and  we 
hope  to  God  never  again  shall  see,  human  nature  so 
degraded.  The  scenes  of  which  we  have  now  at- 
tempted a  faint  description  were  exhibited,  though 
perhaps  to  scarcely  the  same  extent,  at  Campfield, 
in  Salford,  and  at  the  Shambles  in  Bridge  Street  ; 
and  we  trust  the  experience  of  this  day  will  have  given 
to  the  Committee  who  managed  the  proceedings  a 
lesson  which  they  will  never  forget.  As  to  the  dis- 
tribution of  meat  and  liquor,  there  are  two  or  three 
lives  lost  and  fourteen  patients  in  the  Infirmary, 
several  of  them  dangerously  injured,  from  the  events 
of  the  day. 

Two  years  before  this  incident  Henry  Hunt 
had  been  preaching  total  abstinence  among  his 
Radical  followers.  His  motive  was  not  so  much 
evangelical  as  political.  Total  abstinence  was 
one  way  of  impoverishing  a  tyrannical  Govern- 
ment, and  Hunt  tried,  without  success,  to  popu- 
larize a  non-alcoholic  beverage  of  his  own  in- 
vention. The  agitation  was  checked  by  a  leaflet 
in  which  drink  and  the  drink  habit  were  theo- 
logically extolled  and  sobriety  stigmatized  as 
a  conspiracy  against  the  King,  the  Church,  and 
the  Constitution.     The  production  of  this  leaflet 

53 


and  its  distribution  from  door  to  door  cost  ^80, 
which  was  defrayed  from  the  church  rates  and 
included  in  the  churchwardens'  accounts,  though 
an  application  to  the  King's  Bench  for  further 
particulars  of  the  item  caused  it  eventually  to 
be  withdrawn.  The  scene  in  Manchester  on  the 
night  of  George  IV's  coronation,  aided  by  the 
attention  the  Guardian  called  to  it,  set  the 
temperance  movement  going  in  the  town  in  real 
earnest. 

The  Guardian  was  exactly  three  years  old 
when  John  Edward  Taylor  married  his  cousin, 
Sophia  Russell  Scott.  Miss  Scott  was  the  daughter 
of  the  Rev.  Russell  Scott,  who  was  for  forty-five 
years  the  minister  of  the  High  Street  (Unitarian) 
Chapel  at  Portsmouth.  She  was  the  devoted 
sister  of  a  second  Russell  Scott,  who  rose  to  some 
eminence  in  the  commerce  of  London  and  be- 
came the  father  of  Mr.  C.  P.  Scott,  the  present 
editor  and  proprietor  of  the  Manchester  Guardian, 
The  attachment  between  John  Edward  Taylor 
and  his  cousin  had  begun  before  the  Guardian 
was  thought  of,  and  their  marriage  was  probably 
delayed  until  the  venture  should  declare  itself 
as  between  failure  and  success.  In  the  following 
letter  written  by  Miss  Scott  to  her  brother, 
Russell  Scott,  on  May  8,  1 821,  we  hear  from  her 
in  her  own  words  something  which  we  already 
know  about  the  foundation  of  the  paper.  We 
learn  from  it  that  John  Edward  Taylor  did  not 
contemplate  abandoning  at  once  and  altogether 
his  business  in  the  cotton  trade  : 

54 


You  are  perhaps  not  aware  that  It  has  been  for 
some  time  felt,  both  by  Whigs  and  Reformers,  that 
a  well-conducted  paper  was  much  wanted  in  Man- 
chester— one,  to  use  Edward's  words  when  he  first 
wrote  to  me  upon  the  subject,  **  which,  from  its 
character  either  as  a  spirited  vehicle  for  the  promulga- 
tion of  their  political  opinions,  or  from  the  tone  and 
style  of  its  literary  execution,  would  be  considered 
worthy  of  the  populous  and  intelligent  district  in 
which  we  are  situated."  **  Cowdroy's  "  derived  its 
chief  value  from  the  part  Edward  frequently  took  in 
it.  Under  these  circumstances  some  of  the  most 
respectable  and  moderate  persons  in  Manchester 
raised  a  subscription  for  the  purpose  of  establishing 
a  new  newspaper,  and  they  prevailed  on  Edward  to 
become  the  editor.  Their  view  was  public  advantage. 
They  were  willing  to  take  the  risk  without  wishing 
to  have  any  share  in  the  profits. 

Edward's  name  does  not  appear,  but  it  is  generally 
known  he  is  the  editor,  and  indeed  it  was  thought 
no  one  could  establish  a  paper  with  equal  prospects 
of  success.  It  will  not  at  all  interfere  with  his  business, 
as  there  is  a  person  to  take  the  labour  of  it  ;  besides 
which  he  writes  and  composes  with  greater  facility 
than  any  person  I  ever  saw.  ...  I  send  you  a  pro- 
spectus by  which  you  will  see  the  first  number  was 
published  on  Saturday.  Edward  is  very  sanguine  as 
to  its  success,  indeed  he  has  met  with  so  much  en- 
couragement from  all  parties  that  it  were  impossible 
to  be  otherwise.  It  is  indeed  very  gratifying  to  see 
how  completely  amidst  all  the  party  feeling  which  has 
existed  he  has  won  the  confidence  of  all.  This  has 
been  manifested  in  some  very  striking  instances. 

Writing  again  to  her  brother  on  March  7, 
1823,  Miss  Scott  throws  some  light  on  the  early 
progress  of  the  paper  : 

S5 


You  will  be  glad  to  hear  the  Guardiatt  continues 
to  advance.  Saturday  week  the  edition  was  1750. 
Of  last  week  I  have  not  heard,  but  there  was  a  very 
good  show  of  advertisements,  and  another  puff  extra- 
ordinary-, stating  that  they  could  now  venture  to  assert 
its  sale  exceeded  any  other  Manchester  paper,  and 
consequently  offered  the  best  medium  for  advertise- 
ments. 

Writing  himself  to  Miss  Scott  on  December 
28,  1823,  John  Edv^^ard  Taylor  shows  that 
this  early  progress  is  sustained  and  is  even  ac- 
celerating : 

You  would  be  astonished  last  week  at  the  advertise- 
ments, wern't  you,  dear  }  I  was,  at  any  rate.  They 
kept  pouring  in  so  that  I  soon  found  there  would  be 
no  room  to  spare  for  me,  and  therefore,  as  my  men 
were  forward  with  their  work,  I  did  what  I  have  not 
done  before  on  a  Friday  since  I  have  had  the  Guardian^ 
I  went  out  to  a  5  o'clock  dinner,  and  stayed  until 
ID  enjoying  myself,  and  then  returned  to  the  office, 
and  left  it  for  home  at  \  past  2.  The  profit  that  week 
was  upwards  of  ;^36,  and  there  was  so  little  room  for 
news  that  I  wrote  off  on  the  Friday  night  about  a 
quantity  of  smaller  type  to  enable  me  to  compress 
the  advertisements  into  less  compass.  This  will  be 
an  expense  oi  £1  ^o  or  jCiJO,  which  I  did  not  intend 
incurring  at  present  ;  however,  I  really  cannot  say 
that  I  regret  being  obliged  to  do  so. 

I  was  looking  a  little  last  evening  at  the  result 
of  the  half  year,  and  I  find  the  average  of  the  advertise- 
ments for  that  time  to  be  7326?  ^^^  the  average 
profit  £21  6s.  yd.  per  week.  If  as  I  expect  the  profit 
on  the  newspaper  and  the  job  printing  has  been 
sufficient  to  pay  all  expenses,  that  will  make  the  nett 
profit  on  the  half  year  ;^550,  and  that  is  about  what  I 
expect  to  find.     It  will  be  a  week  or  two,  however, 

56 


before  I  am  able  to  finish  my  stocktaking,  and  upon 
that  week  or  two  I  declare  I  almost  look  with  dread. 
...  I  think  I  told  you  I  had  promised  to  give  my 
friends  a  treat  (an  evening  party)  as  soon  as  I  had 
passed  the  lOO  advertisements,  and  this  you  see,  my 
dear,  I  have  now  done  at  a  hand  canter. 

In  the  summer  of  1825  John  Edward  Taylor 
began  the  publication  of  a  Tuesday's  paper. 
It  was  called  the  Advertiser.  Within  a  few 
weeks  of  its  establishment  Mr.  Taylor  became 
the  possessor  by  purchase  of  Harrop's  Mercury, 
which  was  also  published  on  Tuesday.  The  two 
papers  were  amalgamated  under  the  name  of 
the  Manchester  Mercury  and  Tuesday's  General 
Advertiser,  which  continued  to  be  published 
until  December,  1830.  Mr.  Taylor  purchased 
also  from  Mr.  Harrop  the  British  Volunteer. 
This  was  incorporated  with  the  Guardian,  and 
for  a  period  of  time  the  full  title  of  the  paper 
was  The  Manchester  Guardian  and  British  Volun- 
teer. 

John  Edward  Taylor,  writing  on  December 
18,  1825,  to  Mr.  Russell  Scott,  who  had  lent 
important  aid  in  these  undertakings,  says  : 

You  will  be  glad  to  hear  that  hitherto  the  purchase 
of  Harrop's  papers  more  than  answers  my  expectations. 
The  sale  the  first  Saturday  [of  The  Manchester  Guardian 
and  British  Volunteer']  was  3041,  the  second  3001,  and 
yesterday  3109.  The  most  sanguine  expectation  I 
took  of  the  thing  would  have  been  satisfied  with  2800. 
The  Mercury  [the  Tuesday  paper],  too,  goes  on  well. 
We  have  had  on  the  average  about  50  advertisements 
each  week,  and  are  getting  constantly  some  new  sub- 

57 


scribers.     Last  week  the  sale  was  about  440.      I  do 
not  expect  it  ever  to  become  very  large. 

§  III 

On  his  marriage  John  Edward  Taylor  went 
to  live  at  No.  13,  The  Crescent,  Salford.  It 
was  one  of  the  desirable  quarters  of  the  town. 
A  writer  of  about  this  period  assures  the  in- 
habitants "  of  this  charming  elevation  "  that 
they  will  "  always  be  sure  of  rich  rural  scenery 
in  view  of  their  front  windows,  however  crowded 
and  confined  the  back  part  of  their  dwellings 
may  become.  The  fertile  valley,"  he  adds, 
*'  the  meandering  of  the  river  Irwell,  approaching 
to  and  receding  from  the  Crescent,  the  rural  cots, 
the  pleasant  villas,  the  rising  hills,  and  the  distant 
mountains  never  fail  to  create  admiration  as 
often  as  the  eye  looks  over  the  fascinating  pic- 
ture." The  time  was  to  come  when  The  Cres- 
cent receded  somewhat  from  these  ripe  perfec- 
tions and  Mr.  Taylor's  later  days  were  spent  at 
Beech  Hill,  Cheetham  Hill.  Four  children  were 
born  of  the  marriage  and  three  survived — Russell 
Scott  Taylor,  the  second  editor  of  the  Guardian^ 
whose  promising  career  was  cut  short  by  an  early 
death  ;  Sophia  Russell  Taylor,  who  married  Mr. 
Peter  Allen,  and  a  second  John  Edward  Taylor, 
who  was  destined  to  carry  on  the  Guardian  for 
many  years.  The  spiritual  home  of  the  family 
was  the  Cross  Street  Chapel,  of  which  John 
Edward  Taylor  remained  an  active  and  devoted 
member   to    the    day    of   his    death.     Until   his 

58 


thirty-ninth  year  Mr.  Taylor  was  physically  a 
strong  man.  He  lost  the  best  of  his  health,  as 
Huskisson,  the  statesman,  afterwards  lost  his  life, 
through  the  construction  of  the  Liverpool  and 
Manchester  Railway.  The  railway  itself  was 
opened  on  September  15,  1830.  In  the  autumn 
of  1829  engine  trials  were  being  held  at  Rainhill, 
and  at  one  of  these  Mr.  Taylor  was  present. 
The  following  letter,  written  by  Mrs.  John 
Edward  Taylor  on  December  6,  1829,  tells 
what  occurred  in  terms  which  have  a  quaint 
ring: 

I  am  sorry,  my  dear  sister,  you  have  been  so  un- 
easy about  Edward  ;  he  is,  I  am  most  thankful  to 
tell  you,  now  quite  well.  He  had  a  series  of  colds 
one  after  the  other  till  at  last  they  ended  in  a  serious 
illness,  and  before  he  got  strong  he  went  whisking 
through  the  air  at  an  immense  velocity  on  the  Liver- 
pool railroad  without  a  greatcoat,  which  Mr.  Whatton 
(the  family  doctor)  called  *'  a  very  young  trick." 

From  this  time  forward  Mr.  Taylor  suffered 
from  a  bronchial  weakness  which  eventually, 
though  not  for  many  years  yet,  caused  his  death. 
Mrs.  John  Edward  Taylor,  in  whose  life  and 
character  Liberal  Nonconformity  had  flowered 
into  much  beauty  of  mind  and  spirit,  died  in 
1832.  In  1836  Mr.  Taylor  married  as  his 
second  wife  Miss  Harriet  Acland  Boyce,  of 
Tiverton,  by  whom  he  had  three  children,  one 
of  whom  married  Stanley  Jevons,  the  economist. 

Jeremiah  Garnett  produced  his  new  machines 
in  1828,  and  the  Guardian  greatly  improved  on 

59 


its  personal  appearance.  For  the  first  time  the 
hand  of  the  sub-editor  began  to  appear.  Hither- 
to, things,  some  of  them  useful  and  others  merely 
curious,  had  got  into  its  columns  as  they  get  into  a 
schoolboy's  pocket,  by  force  of  gravitation  and  a 
profound  unwillingness  of  the  spirit  to  eject  any- 
thing. But  somebody  was  by  now  acquiring 
the  courage  of  the  blue  pencil,  and  the  things 
which  were  admitted  were  shown  to  their  re- 
served seats  and  kept  there.  The  markets  begin 
to  be  grouped  under  a  common  heading.  Law, 
politics,  commerce,  local  news,  and  foreign  news 
begin  to  find  their  settlements,  and  the  paper 
shows  its  continuing  enterprise  by  announcing 
on  the  eve  of  the  Lancaster  Assizes  that  a  reporter 
will,  as  usual,  attend. 

By  this  time  the  local  ground  had  been  cleared 
of  a  dense  and  stunted  eighteenth-century  journal- 
ism. There  were  fewer  papers  and  those  which 
were  left  standing  were  shooting  up.  The  trium- 
virate of  Guardian^  Courier ,  and  Examiner  was  all 
of  it  now  in  being.  In  1824,  Mr.  Archibald 
Prentice,  minor  prophet  and  historian  of  the 
Manchester  School,  bought  the  remnants  of 
Cowdroy's  Gazette  from  the  widow  of  William 
Cowdroy  and  transformed  it  into  the  Manchester 
Gazette.  In  1827  it  failed,  but  was  revived  the 
next  year  for  Mr.  Prentice's  benefit  as  the 
Manchester  Gazette  and  Times ^  and  developed  in 
1848  into  the  Manchester  Examiner  and  Times, 
illustrious  for  the  long  editorship  of  Mr.  Henry 
Dunckley.     The    Courier   was    a    year    younger 

60 


than  the  Examiner.  Mr.  Thomas  Sowler,  who 
founded  it,  was  a  bookseller,  and  our  first  tidings 
of  him  are  obtained  from  an  announcement  in  the 
Guardian  that  he  is  willing  to  receive  advertise- 
ments and  other  communications  for  the  paper 
at  his  shop  in  St.  Ann's  Square.  He  was  thus 
brought  into  relationship  with  journalism,  and 
when  the  Tory  and  Anti-Catholic  party  in 
Manchester  began  to  find  themselves,  as  they 
now  did,  dangerously  outdone  in  the  press,  Mr. 
Sowler  came  to  their  help  with  the  Courier^ 
which  appeared  on  January  i,  1825.  The  pro- 
prietor and  his  advisers  made  an  ambitious  choice 
of  an  editor  for  the  new  paper.  The  call  for 
reform  and  the  call  for  Catholic  relief  were 
swelling  considerably  ;  the  laws  which  penalized 
Dissent  were  all  but  gone.  These  Liberal  causes 
had  many  friends  now  even  in  the  House  of 
Lords.  Earl  Grey,  cold  and  silvery  but  still  a 
planet,  was  rising  in  the  skies.  Earl  Fitzwilliam 
had  been  dismissed  from  the  Lord  Lieutenancy 
of  the  West  Riding  for  Liberal  sympathies. 
On  the  Tory  side,  these  were  no  times  for  the 
Wheelers  and  Harrops  and  other  men  of  un- 
limited prejudices  but  few  words.  Mr.  Alaric 
Watts  was  accordingly  chosen  to  be  editor  of  the 
Courier,  in  the  hope  that  a  professional  writer  and 
the  personal  friend  of  Scott  and  Wordsworth 
and  Coleridge  would  be  more  than  a  match 
for  the  native  literary  talent  of  the  Taylors  and 
Garnetts  and  Prentices. 

The   Whig    Guardian   and    the   Tory    Courier 

61 


began  a  private  and  personal  feud  which  lasted 
till  the  turn  of  journalistic  manners,  after  which 
they  fell  under  a  kind  of  anaesthesia  as  to  one 
another's  existence,  the  one  never  mentioning 
the  other  by  name  again.  In  the  days  when 
speaking  terms  still  subsisted,  the  speaking  and 
the  being  spoken  to  were,  on  the  side  of  the 
Gua?'diari,  done  chiefly  by  Mr.  Garnett.  We 
find  Mr.  Garnett  characterized  in  the  Courier  as 
'*  an  impudent  and  wilful  perverter  of  the  truth," 
as  '*  a  blockhead,"  and  as  "  a  defender  of  national 
infidelity."  Mr.  Garnett  is  found  accusing  the 
Courier  alliteratively  of  a  "  crawling  and  cowardly 
lie."  The  feeling  between  Mr.  Garnett  and  Mr. 
Sowler  ran  very  high.  They  all  but  fought  a 
duel.  Mr.  Garnett,  though  called  upon  by 
Mr.  Sowler's  "  second,"  declined  the  duel  with 
pistols,  but  evinced  no  objection  an  hour  or  two 
later  to  a  meeting  with  umbrellas  in  St.  Ann's 
Square,  whence  the  matter  was  removed  and 
adjourned  to  the  police  court.  This  incident 
occurred  on  July  24,  1839. 

Long  before  this  the  Guardian  had  definitely 
settled  down  to  a  middle  position  in  politics. 
It  was  a  Whig  paper,  and  cautious  even  at  that. 
These  were  days  when  great  cities  and  large 
houses  remained  voteless  and  voiceless  in  the 
House  of  Commons  ;  in  which  Roman  Catholics 
were  helots  and  Nonconformists  only  just 
tolerated.  A  savage  Corn  Law,  passed  in  the 
interests  of  rent,  barred  at  once  the  entrance  of 
foreign  food  and  the  exit  of  English  manufac- 

62 


tures,  to  the  great  bewilderment  of  politicians 
who  wished  it  to  serve  the  one  end  and  not  the 
other.  These  were  grievances  which  affected 
the  middle-class.  The  working-class  shared  them, 
and  had  many  which  were  peculiar  to  itself. 
Through  it  all  the  Guardian  remained  studiously 
moderate  and  opportunistic.  It  was  extraordi- 
narily unspeculative.  "  We  are  not,"  said  Cicero, 
*'  in  the  republic  of  Plato,  but  in  the  mud  of 
Romulus."  In  the  spirit  of  this  admonition  the 
Guardian  wanted  the  next  thing  next.  The  next 
thing  was  to  reform  a  system  of  representation 
which  allowed  one  hundred  boroughs  whose 
united  population  did  not  equal  that  of  Man- 
chester and  Salford  to  send  two  hundred  mem- 
bers to  Parliament,  while  Manchester  and  Salford 
were  without  one. 

At  the  beginning  of  1828  John  Edward  Taylor 
was  drawn,  and  perhaps  driven,  by  his  Radical 
critics  into  a  more  compendious  confession  of 
faith.  He  pronounced  himself  in  favour  of  the 
removal  of  civil  disabilities  for  religious  beliefs, 
the  improvement  and  ultimate  removal  of  the 
Corn  Laws,  severe  economy  in  public  depart- 
ments, the  amendment  of  the  game  laws,  and  the 
abolition  of  various  trading  monopolies  with  the 
West  Indies,  India,  and  China.  Banking  and 
currency  reform  greatly  interested  him.  He 
thought  the  distinction  between  Whig  and  Tory 
might  go,  as  indeed  it  soon  did,  and  that  a  new 
division  might  be  made  between  *'  Political 
Economists  "    and    '*  Monopolists."     This    also 

63 


occurred,  though  the  names  of  "  Liberal  "  and 
"  Conservative,"  which  were  chosen  to  express 
much  the  same  idea,  were  perhaps  a  more  con- 
venient currency.  So  much  for  his  positives. 
His  negatives  were  not  few.  We  suspect  that  he 
did  not  wish  too  popular  a  franchise.  We  know 
that  he  was  against  shorter  Parliaments  and  the 
ballot,  and  on  the  question  of  the  Corn  Laws 
he  had  not  yet  learned  to  pronounce  the  magic 
name  "  repeal."  "  A  fixed  duty  is  a  fixed  in- 
justice "  were  the  words  on  the  scroll  which  ran 
in  one  piece  round  the  Free  Trade  Hall  in  the 
early  forties.  John  Edward  Taylor  was  not  yet 
quite  of  this  mind. 

But  he  was  becoming  every  year  a  much  more 
versatile  and  resourceful  editor.  He  was  col- 
lecting a  staff.  In  1830  he  made  a  journey  to 
Hull  to  secure  a  particularly  promising  reporter. 
This  was  a  certain  John  Harland,  who  had  been 
trained  as  a  printer  but  had  made  himself  the 
most  expert  shorthand  writer  in  the  country. 
John  Harland  was  brought  to  Manchester  and 
served  the  Guardian  as  its  chief  reporter  for 
thirty  years.  His  importance  in  the  history  of 
journalism  and  his  eminence  as  a  Lancashire 
antiquary  have  caused  his  useful  life  to  be  com- 
memorated in  the  Dictionary  of  National  Bio- 
graphy. No  fewer  than  three  members  of  the 
Guardian  connection  of  this  time — Taylor,  Gar- 
nett,  and  Harland — were  destined  to  figure 
honourably  in  that  great  gallery  of  English 
notability. 

64 


IV  :    CLASSICAL  MANCHESTER 


E 


CHAPTER      IV 

Qlassical  DAanchester 

IT  is  with  strong  emotions  of  joy  and  hope,  says 
the  leading  article  in  the  Manchester  Guardian  of 
June  9,  1832,  that  we  announce  the  fact  that  the 
English  Reform  Bill  has  at  length  become  the  law 
of  the  land.  Now  that  the  Reform  Bill  has  passed, 
the  editor  proceeded,  it  is  proper  that  the  electors  of 
Manchester  should  apply  themselves  seriously  to  the 
important  question,  who  are  to  be  their  representatives. 
.  .  .  There  is  not  one  of  the  new  boroughs — probably 
there  is  not  one  place,  borough  or  county,  invested 
with  the  elective  franchise,  the  proceedings  in  which 
at  the  ensuing  election  will  be  watched  with  such  in- 
tense anxiety  as  those  of  Manchester.  It  depends  on 
the  constituency  of  this  town  to  give  a  practical  proof 
of  the  validity  of  their  claim  to  be  invested  with  the 
franchise  by  the  discreet  and  conscientious  mode  in 
which  they  exercise  it.  The  representatives  of  Man- 
chester, the  metropolis  of  the  most  important  trade  of 
the  kingdom,  ought  to  be  able  to  exert  not  a  mere 
personal  but  a  high  degree  of  moral  influence  in  the 
House  of  Commons.  They  should  be  men  of  mature 
age,  sound  judgment,  good  talents  improved  by 
sedulous  cultivation,  irreproachable  private  character, 
and  thoroughly  liberal  public  principles.  Wealth  is 
no  absolutely  indispensable  requisite  ;  yet  undoubtedly 
they  ought  to  have  at  least  the  means  of  maintaining 
with  independence  and  without  serious  personal  sacri- 
fice the  unavoidable  expenses  attendant  on  their 
station. 

With  this  grave  benediction  the  electoral  his- 
tory of  Manchester  began.      We  are  under  no 

67 


illusions  at  this  time  of  day  about  the  Reform 
Act  of  1832.  For  every  person  whom  it 
satisfied  it  disappointed  at  least  ten.  The  popu- 
lation of  Manchester  was  181,768.  The  number 
of  voters  on  the  new  register  was  only  4293, 
and  it  may  be  calculated  that  at  least  six  fami- 
lies in  seven  were  left  unrepresented.  It  is  a 
curious  fact  that  the  unrepresented  did  not  imme- 
diately perceive  what  had  happened  to  them. 
Two  months  after  the  bill  passed  the  town  rose 
en  masse  and  welcomed  it  with  a  public  holiday, 
which  passed  off  very  well  considering  that  so 
many  people  must  have  been  prone  to  two  re- 
flections, the  one  that  they  had  not  themselves 
personally  been  endowed  with  any  share  in  the 
British  Constitution,  and  the  second  that  they 
might  on  the  other  hand  be  participating  at 
any  minute  in  the  Asiatic  cholera  which  was 
raging  through  the  town.  The  Guardian  de- 
scribes the  proceedings  at  great  length,  and  the 
report  gives  us  an  interesting  exhibition  of  a 
Bank  Holiday  in  its  infancy. 

The  procession  was  formed  at  ten  o'clock  in 
the  morning  at  The  Crescent  in  Salford,  and 
marched  by  way  of  Chapel  Street,  Blackfriars 
Street,  St.  Mary's  Gate,  Market  Street,  and 
High  Street,  where  it  followed  a  route  no  longer 
processional  to  Ardwick  Green,  which  was  then 
a  much-favoured  spot,  and  had  only  recently 
been  described  by  a  local  author  as  the  most 
desirable  suburb  in  England.  On  Ardwick  Green 
there  was  a  pond,   and   from   a   bridge   thrown 

68 


across  this  pond — the  gentry  occupying  the  most 
favoured  stations  around  the  edge  of  the  water, 
the  others  in  less  advantageous  positions,  though 
still  commanding  a  full  view,  and  every  pair  of 
eyes  in  the  town  directed  expectantly  up — Mr. 
Charles  Green,  the  celebrated  aeronaut,  pro- 
ceeded to  release  a  balloon  cunningly  shaped 
and  painted  to  represent  Earl  Grey,  and  when 
the  extreme  diversion  which  this  object  con- 
tinued to  cause  as  long  as  it  remained  in  sight 
was  at  an  end  he  proceeded,  amid  breathless 
attention,  to  make  an  ascent  himself.  In  order 
to  bring  home  to  the  mind  of  the  people  how 
completely  he  had  cut  himself  off  from  his 
mother  earth,  Mr.  Green,  when  at  an  altitude 
of  three  thousand  feet,  as  the  Guardian  reporter 
computed  it,  released  a  goose  from  the  car,  which, 
"  after  falling  a  few  yards,  recovered  the  use  of 
its  wings,  took  an  angle  of  60  to  70  degrees,  and 
appeared  to  alight  in  safety."  When  he  was 
much  higher  still  Mr.  Green  liberated  a  para- 
chute, the  basket  of  which  contained  a  cat.  The 
parachute  descended  in  a  field  near  to  Newton, 
and  the  cat  was  restored  in  safety  to  "  No.  3 
gasworks,"  where  it  ordinarily  lived. 

Mr.  Green  had  by  this  time  vanished,  but  it 
was  rumoured  truthfully  in  the  town  in  the  evening 
that  he  also  had  come  to  earth  near  Rochdale. 
Meanw^hile  the  procession  had  been  re-formed 
and  had  finally  disbanded  itself  in  St.  Ann's 
Square.  The  watchmen  of  the  town  had  figured 
very  conspicuously  in  the  day's  pageantry.    They 

69 


marched  at  the  end  of  the  procession,  130  in 
number,  and  wearing  their  watchmen's  coats 
and  gold-laced  hats.  The  watchmen  also  carried 
their  sticks  and  rattles,  and  at  intervals  during 
the  progress  of  the  procession  the  Guardian  tells 
us  that  they  **  sprang  their  rattles,"  sometimes  in 
divisions  and  sometimes  all  together,  but  never 
failing  to  produce  a  very  singular  noise. 

Meanwhile  the  Guardian  had  been  holding  a 
weekly  review  of  the  possible  Parliamentary 
candidates.  The  choice  of  candidates  was  not 
managed  without  a  definite  and  public  split 
between  the  Whigs  and  those  who  were  now 
beginning  to  call  themselves  Radicals.  On  one 
candidate  Whigs  and  Radicals  were  agreed.  It 
was  to  be  Mark  Philips.  Mark  Philips,  to  whom 
belongs  the  title  of  "  first  member  for  Man- 
chester," or  more  exactly  "  first  senior  member 
for  Manchester,"  was  the  son  of  Mr.  Robert 
Philips,  a  partner  in  the  firm  of  J.  and  N.  Philips 
and  Co.,  of  Church  Street.  He  was  born  in  1 800, 
and  made  his  entrance  into  public  life  in  Man- 
chester in  1826  at  a  reformers'  meeting  in  the 
Manor  Court-room,  at  which,  being  in  his  way 
rather  a  *'  catch,"  he  was  received  with  open 
arms,  and  paid  for  his  welcome  with  a  very 
promising  speech  against  the  Corn  Laws.  He 
continued  to  be  the  member  for  Manchester 
until  1 847,  taking  a  distinguished  part  in  the 
Free  Trade  campaign  on  the  floor  of  the  House 
of  Commons  and  on  the  platform  of  the  Free 
Trade  Hall.     When  the  battle  was  w^on  he  retired 

70 


to  a  country  life  in  Warwickshire,  but  remained 
a  faithful  member  of  the  Liberal  party,  making 
his  last  appearance  in  Manchester  in  October, 
I  871,  at  the  banquet  which  celebrated  the  open- 
ing of  the  Reform  Club  in  that  year.  His  name 
is  commemorated  in  Philips  Park.  In  his  address 
to  the  electors  in  1832  Mark  Philips  pronounced 
for  shorter  Parliaments,  the  ballot,  public  eco- 
nomy, the  removal  of  the  taxes  on  knowledge, 
the  repeal  of  the  Corn  Laws  (*'  the  greatest  and 
most  oppressive  of  all  monopolies  "),  the  reform 
of  the  existing  system  of  supporting  the  Church, 
and  the  abolition  of  tithes.  The  Guardian^ 
though  "  not  able  to  go  with  Mr.  Philips  in  all 
his  views,"  accepted  him  cordially  as  the  first 
candidate  of  the  Whig  party. 

For  the  second  candidate  the  choice  of  the 
Guardian  fell  on  Mr.  S.  J.  Loyd,  a  banker  of 
great  wealth  and  eminence,  who  had  descended 
on  the  constituency  from  the  City  of  London, 
though  he  was  not  without  a  business  connection 
with  Manchester.  Loyd  was  a  friend  of  Senior, 
the  economist,  and  Grote,  the  historian,  and  his 
standing  in  the  City  of  London  was  such  that 
when,  in  a  later  chapter  of  history,  he  became 
definitely  converted  though  rather  late  in  the 
day  to  Free  Trade  and  sent  a  subscription  to  the 
League  it  was  generally  felt  in  all  the  clubs  that 
the  Corn  Laws  were  past  praying  for.  He  was 
much  the  same  kind  of  politician  as  those  whom 
we  knew  at  a  recent  election  as  "  Unionist  Free- 
traders,"   and    had    the    high    moral    authority, 

71 


not  to  say  sanctity,  of  that  connection.  John 
Edward  Taylor  attended  the  first  of  his  meet- 
ings in  Manchester,  and  put  to  him  the  question 
of  questions — whether,  had  he  been  in  Parlia- 
ment, he  would  have  supported  the  Reform 
Bill.  The  answer  was  not  given  without  some 
circumlocution.  But  Mr.  Taylor  was  satisfied, 
and  from  that  time  forw^ard  his  candidates  were 
Philips  and  Loyd.  Unhappily  the  Radicals 
would  not  accept  Loyd,  and  at  the  end  of  several 
weeks,  in  which  their  proceedings  were  watched 
with  great  anxiety,  they  produced  from  their 
sleeve  Mr.  Charles  Poulett  Thomson,  Vice- 
President  of  the  Board  of  Trade  in  Lord  Grey's 
Administration,  a  budding  Free-trader,  and  so 
good  a  friend  to  the  rights  of  man  that  Jeremy 
Bentham  had  personally  canvassed  for  him  in 
Dover. 

There  is  no  doubt  that  the  Guardian  would 
have  liked  to  support  Poulett  Thomson,  but  it 
held  by  its  pledge  to  Loyd  at  the  cost  of  nearly 
all  its  enjoyment  of  the  contest.  The  Tories 
put  up  Mr.  J.  T.  Hope,  who,  having  no  earthly 
prospect  of  success  and  being  a  very  delightful 
and  aristocratic  young  man,  became  the  spoiled 
darling  of  the  contest,  and  was  indulged  in  every- 
thing short  of  actual  votes.  New  Cross  had  a 
candidate  almost  entirely  to  itself  in  William 
Cobbett.  The  Guardian  never  could  away  with 
William  Cobbett,  and  its  long  reports  of  his 
speeches  are  often  to  be  found  prefaced  with  the 
somewhat  curt  introduction,  ''This  person  said." 

72 


More  specifically,  It  described  him  as  "  an  un- 
principled demagogue  and  consummate  quack," 
and  indeed  the  main  ground  of  the  Guardian's 
objection  to  Poulett  Thomson  was  lest  three 
Reform  candidates  should  **  let  in  "  the  un- 
speakable Cobbett. 

On  the  morning  of  December  1 2  the  town 
knew  by  the  early  ringing  of  the  Collegiate 
Church  bells  that  the  election  day  had  arrived. 
The  modern  reader  is  to  imagine  the  hustings 
erected  In  St.  Ann's  Square,  close  to  the  palisading 
of  the  church  and  facing  the  spot  where  the 
statue  of  Cobden  now  stands.  Six  boxes  of  the 
shape  associated  with  the  Punch  and  Judy  show 
formed  the  hustings.  The  Boroughreeve,  with 
the  churchwardens,  the  sidesmen,  and  the  re- 
porters, occupied  the  central  box,  and  each  of 
the  other  compartments  held  a  candidate  with 
a  select  body  of  his  supporters,  the  whole  com- 
pany presenting  to  the  crowd  below  a  complete 
selection  of  current  political  opinion  and  a  very 
striking  array  of  blue,  claret,  and  bottle-green 
broadcloth,  stovepipe  hats,  high  stocks,  side 
whiskers,  and  ingratiating  expressions  of  face. 
On  the  ground  immediately  below  stood  five 
hundred  special  constables,  and  behind  the  special 
constables  the  firemen. 

The  beadle  rang  his  bell  and  proclaimed 
silence  ;  the  Boroughreeve  took  the  oath,  and 
the  long  process  of  nominating  and  seconding 
each  candidate  began.  It  was  a  fatal  obstacle 
to  the  smooth  working  of  this  part  of  the  pro- 

73 


ceedings  that  each  nominator  and  seconder  was 
a  local  man  known  intimately  and  in  all  his  most 
vulnerable  points  to  the  wit  and  mischief  of  the 
town.  The  first  speaker  had  not  proceeded  for 
more  than  a  moment  or  two,  and  the  early 
novelty  of  seeing  a  familiar  face  in  unfamiliar 
surroundings  had  hardly  worn  away,  when  some- 
one in  the  crowd  recovered  his  self-possession 
and  directed  a  telling  shaft  at  the  personal  ap- 
pearance or  the  domestic  circumstances  of  the 
speaker,  some  debt  for  which  he  had  sued  or 
been  sued,  his  tendency  to  be  too  thrifty  or  not 
thrifty  enough,  or  any  other  intimate  personal 
particular  which,  though  it  had  nothing  to  do 
with  the  argument  in  hand,  was  calculated  to 
import  into  it  much  ridicule  or  prejudice.  The 
friends  of  the  speaker  were  much  mortified  by 
this  palpable  hit,  and  from  this  time  forward  the 
gentlemen  in  the  hustings  gazed  down  over  their 
stocks  at  a  scene  of  irrecovered  and  irrecoverable 
pandemonium.  At  the  first  election  the  beadle 
rang  his  bell  almost  incessantly  from  a  quarter 
past  nine  in  the  morning  till  a  quarter  past  one, 
when  the  Boroughreeve  was  understood  though 
not  heard  to  be  proclaiming  Philips  and  Cobbett 
elected  on  a  show  of  hands.  A  poll  was  de- 
manded in  dumb  show  by  all  the  other  candidates, 
and  this  took  place  on  the  tv/o  following  days, 
with  the  result  that  the  two  Reform  candidates. 
Philips  and  Poulett  Thomson,  were  elected  by 
a  comfortable  majority,  the  Guardian  accepting 
the  result  with  pleasure  tempered  with  a  mild 

74 


regret  for  the  defeat  of  Mr.  Loyd,  who  had  not 
been  quite  sound  and  satisfactory  on  the  question 
of  the  slave  trade.  The  country  had  to  wait 
many  years  yet  for  the  ballot,  and  it  throws  a 
curious  light  on  the  system  of  open  voting  to 
find  the  Guardian  severely  censuring  a  barrister 
and  a  merchant  whom  its  reporter  had  caught 
in  the  act  of  voting  for  Cobbett.  The  election 
was  treated  to  seven  and  a  half  columns  of  the 
Guardian  s  narrow  space. 

In  the  same  number  a  lady  in  Ancoats  adver- 
tises for  a  footman  of  undoubted  respectability, 
and  elegant  apartments  are  offered  to  a  gentle- 
man in  a  small  family  in  the  neighbourhood  of 
the  Portico  in  Mosley  Street.  It  was  not  im- 
possible about  this  time  to  find  **  a  drawing-room 
and  one  or  two  bedrooms  to  be  let  in  Piccadilly," 
and,  a  year  or  two  later  than  1832,  a  young  man 
who  resided  in  the  country  announced  himself 
in  the  Guardian  as  *'  desirous  of  dining  with  a 
respectable  family  daily  at  one  o'clock  within 
five  minutes'  walk  of  the  Exchange."  But  the 
town  was  on  the  eve  of  great  changes.  It  was 
in  1832  that  Mr.  Brooks,  of  the  firm  of  Cunliffe 
and  Brooks,  the  bankers,  broke  in  on  the  residen- 
tial gentility  of  Mosley  Street  by  converting  his 
house  in  that  street  into  a  warehouse.  Richard 
Cobden  soon  afterwards  did  the  same  thing,  moving 
his  residency  for  another  twelve  years  into  Quay 
Street.  With  the  fall  of  residential  Mosley 
Street  we  begin  to  hear  of  the  rise  of  Rusholme 
and   Broughton  and   Pendleton.     The  Victorian 

75 


detached  house,  with  its  carriage  drive  and  its 
stables  and  banks  of  rhododendra,  begins  to  take 
the  place  of  the  eighteenth-century  town  house 
which  disdained  not  to  stand  in  a  row  and  open 
on  to  a  street.  And  when  the  change  came,  it 
came  so  rapidly  and  spared  so  little  that 
eighteenth-century  Manchester  is  now  almost  as 
difficult  to  find  as  mediaeval  Manchester.  There 
is  still  a  conspicuous  Tudor  fragment  in  Market 
Place.  As  for  the  eighteenth  century,  it  has  to  be 
reconstructed  from  an  occasional  domestic  door- 
way— perhaps  the  remnants  of  a  torch  extin- 
guisher— to  a  warehouse,  though  there  is  a 
sustained  similitude  of  it  in  St.  John  Street. 
In  this  street,  though  frightened  not  a  little 
by  the  doctors'  automobiles,  the  eighteenth 
century  still  lingers.  It  may  be  traced  in  the 
architecture  of  the  street  ;  still  more  in  the 
interiors  of  the  houses,  in  their  shutter-boxes, 
and  in  the  sweeping  curves  of  their  staircases. 

An  early  sign  of  the  new  age  which  was 
opening  now  that  a  reformed  Parliament  had 
met  was  the  removal  of  some  of  the  duties  on 
newspapers.  In  1833  ^^^  duty  on  advertise- 
ments was  reduced  from  three-and-sixpence  to 
one-and-sixpence,  and  in  1836  the  price  of 
the  stamp  was  lowered  from  fourpence  to  one 
penny.  The  Guardian  responded  to  this  better 
weather  by  lowering  its  price  in  the  autumn  of 
1836  to  fourpence  and  by  appearing  twice  a 
week,  adding  a  Wednesday's  issue  to  the  older 
issue   of  Saturday.     The   market   report   in    the 

76 


Wednesday  edition  proved  extremely  useful  to 
business  men,  and  the  hold  of  the  paper  on  com- 
mercial Manchester  was  strengthened  by  it  not 
a  little. 

§11 

The  week  beginning  on  December  13,  1838, 
was  an  eventful  one  in  the  life  of  Richard  Cobden. 
On  that  day  there  was  a  meeting  of  the  Man- 
chester Chamber  of  Commerce.  The  directors 
had  drafted  a  meek  and  mild  petition  to  Parlia- 
ment on  the  subject  of  the  Corn  Laws,  and  they 
now  asked  the  members  of  the  Chamber  to 
sanction  it.  The  members  were  about  to  do  so 
when  Mr.  Cobden  rose  from  a  remote  corner 
of  the  room  and  attacked  the  Corn  Laws  in  a 
speech  of  such  argument  and  conviction  that  it 
completely  changed  the  temper  of  the  meeting. 
The  directors  were  obliged  to  take  back  their 
petition  and  to  consent  to  an  adjournment  of  the 
meeting  for  a  week.  On  the  next  day  another 
cause  in  which  Mr.  Cobden  was  deeply  con- 
cerned was,  not  advanced  but  finally  won. 
The  first  municipal  council  for  Manchester  was 
elected,  and  Mr.  Cobden  was  returned  as  a 
councillor  for  St.  Michael's  Ward.  John  Edward 
Taylor,  who  had  also  laboured  long  and  hard  for 
incorporation,  was  elected  for  St.  Ann's  Ward. 
Among  the  other  new  councillors  were  Henry 
Tootal,  Elkanah  Armitage,  William  Romaine 
Callender,  S.  D.  Darbishire,  and  Thomas  Potter. 
The  first  meeting  of  the  Council  was  held  on 

77 


the  next  day,  when  Mr.  Cobden  was  made  an 
alderman  and  proposed  Joseph  Heron  for  the 
office  of  Town  Clerk.  Three  days  of  the  week 
were  thus  busily  occupied,  and  on  the  seventh 
day  the  Chamber  of  Commerce  met  again,  and 
Mr.  Alderman  Cobden  carried  his  resolution  in 
favour  of  total  repeal  and  became  thereby  the 
marked  man  of  the  agitation  which  was  now 
beginning  in  earnest  and  was  to  make  Manchester 
for  eight  years  the  political  centre  and  capital 
of  England. 

Tv^o  years  before  this  an  Anti-Corn  Law  Asso- 
ciation had  been  formed  in  London  with  several 
distinguished  politicians  and  literary  men  in  its 
membership,  but  the  climate  was  against  it, 
and  it  did  not  flourish.  The  City  of  London 
finally  came  into  the  movement,  but  not  for 
several  years  yet.  There  had  been  a  sporadic 
outbreak  of  the  agitation  in  Bolton,  where  a 
young  medical  student,  Mr.  A.  W.  Paulton, 
who  was  to  become  later  on  a  distinguished 
spokesman  of  the  League,  had  been  lecturing 
brilliantly  on  Free  Trade.  But  the  historic 
starting  point  of  the  affair  was  a  little  meeting 
called  by  Archibald  Prentice  and  addressed  by 
Dr.  Bowring,  the  traveller  and  economist,  in  the 
York  Hotel  in  Manchester  on  September  lo, 
1838.  Out  of  this  meeting  grew  the  Man- 
chester Anti-Corn  Law  Association,  which  was 
in  its  turn  the  nucleus  of  the  Anti-Corn  Law 
League.  John  Bright  was  an  original  member. 
Richard  Cobden  joined  when  the  Association  was 

78 


about  a  week  old,  and  with  him  joined  John 
Edward  Taylor  and  Jeremiah  Garnett,  of  the 
Manchester  Guardian.  In  the  lists  of  its  earliest 
members  and  subscribers  occur  the  names  of 
Armitage,  Ashton,  Bannerman,  Greg,  Philips, 
Rylands,  and  Watts. 

We  cannot  here  follow  all  the  movements  of 
an  organization  which  developed  such  resources 
of  money  and  enthusiasm  and  ability  as  to  be- 
come in  truth  another  estate  of  the  realm.  The 
conventions  which  began  from  this  time  forward 
to  be  held  in  Manchester  were  not  only  orgies 
of  eloquence  but  parliaments  of  manufacturing 
and  Dissenting  England.  Manchester  was  Mecca. 
By  1840  it  had  been  found  that  the  town  had 
no  meeting  place  anything  like  large  enough  to 
hold  the  streams  of  pilgrims,  and  at  the  beginning 
of  that  year  there  was  erected  on  the  site  of  the 
present  Free  Trade  Hall  a  wooden  pavilion 
which  was  by  far  the  largest  place  of  public 
assembly  in  the  country.  The  land  on  which 
this  pavilion  stood  was  lent  to  the  Association  by 
Mr.  Cobden,  to  whom  it  belonged.  In  1843 
the  pavilion  was  taken  down,  and  the  first  Free 
Trade  Hall,  the  predecessor  of  the  present 
building,  erected  in  its  place.  The. opening  of 
this  hall  was  the  first  event  in  a  great  week  of 
convention.  The  volume  of  the  speaking  which 
was  done  in  Manchester  that  week  may  be  esti- 
mated from  the  fact  that  the  report  in  the  Man- 
chester Guardian  of  Wednesday  measures  no 
fewer   than   thirty-nine   close   columns   of  print 

79 


out  of  a  possible  forty-eight,  and  the  meetings 
were  still  continuing  when  the  paper  went  to 
press. 

Both  the  Pavilion  of  1 840  and  the  Free  Trade 
Hall  of  1843  were  opened  with  banquets.  But 
the  League  did  not  habitually  dine.  It  belonged 
to  the  middle-class,  and  it  took  tea.  Its  charac- 
teristic function  was  the  tea-party.  The  League 
held  tea-parties  everywhere.  Mammoth  tea- 
parties  were  held  in  the  Free  Trade  Hall  and 
the  Corn  Exchange  in  Manchester,  and  the 
ministers'  vestries  and  deacons'  vestries  of  a 
widespread  Nonconformity  emptied  themselves 
into  these  gatherings  without  experiencing  any 
change  of  atmosphere.  The  League  all  but 
invented  the  bazaar.  Its  bazaars  in  the  Theatre 
Royal  in  Manchester  and  Covent  Garden  Theatre 
in  London  stand  alongside  the  Art  Treasures 
Exhibitions  of  the  time,  and  were  not  outdone 
by  them.  These  tea-parties  and  bazaars  were 
the  cause  of  the  first  appearance  of  women  in 
active  public  life  in  England.  Ladies  '*  presided 
at  "  tea-tables  and  served  at  stalls.  The  Guardian 
gives  their  names  in  long  lists,  and  Bastiat,  the 
French  economist,  who  was  watching  things  on 
the  spot,  told  the  French  people  of  this  as  of 
something  new  and  strange.  Subscriptions  to 
the  ^50,000,  the  ^^60,000,  and  the  ^250,000 
Funds  were  announced  and  often  thrown  on  the 
table  in  the  Free  Trade  Hall  amid  scenes  of 
ecstasy.  The  League  drew  upon  vast  resources  of 
platform  ability  which  was  second  only  to  that  of 

80 


Cobden  and  Bright  and  Fox,  and  the  Guardian 
of  the  time  gives  us  the  impression  that  everyone 
of  importance  in  the  town  could  make  a  speech 
like  Peel.  George  Wilson,  who  presided  over 
all  the  great  meetings,  is  said  to  have  developed 
such  a  virtuosity  of  chairmanship  that  no  one 
has  equalled  him  in  that  capacity  before  or 
since. 

On  the  eve  of  Peel's  surrender,  in  1 846,  the 
last  of  all  these  great  meetings  was  held  in  the 
Free  Trade  Hall.  Even  in  the  plain  and  almost 
hackneyed  language  of  the  Guardian  reporter 
we  can  feel  the  height  which  feeling  had  reached. 
*'  Before  seven  o'clock,"  he  says,  *'  platform, 
galleries,  and  floor  were  crammed  to  a  degree 
we  never  before  witnessed.  About  twenty-five 
past  seven  Mr.  George  Wilson  took  the  chair. 
He  was  accompanied  by  R.  Cobden,  Esq., 
J.  Bright,  Esq.,  W.  J.  Fox,  Esq.,  and  Colonel 
Thompson.  The  cheering  from  all  parts  of  the 
hall  as  these  gentlemen  were  recognized  was 
tremendous."  The  reporter  renders  the  deepest 
homage  in  his  power  to  William  Johnson  Fox 
by  reporting  him,  and  him  alone,  in  the  first 
person.     Here  are  his  concluding  words  : 

It  is  here,  it  is  coming,  the  end  of  this  struggle, 
and,  come  when  it  will,  the  testimony  shall  be  borne 
not  only  here  but  all  over  the  country  that  you,  the 
men  of  Manchester,  you  have  done  it.  All  else  has 
been  subsidiary.  Philosophers  have  laid  down  the 
principles.  Statisticians  have  collected  the  facts  and 
arranged  the  results.  Politicians  are  but  the  machinery 
by  which  these  results  are  to  be  reduced  to  legislative 

81  F 


practice.  Queen,  Lords,  and  Commons  will  be  but 
the  formal  agents  to  give  solemn  record  and  authority 
to  that  which,  whenever  and  however  accomplished, 
originated  in  Manchester,  originated  with  you.  (Great 
cheering  as  the  speaker  resumed  his  seat,  after  a  speech 
of  about  an  hour's  duration.) 

The  Manchester  Guardian  never  compromised 
on  the  full  doctrine  of  Free  Trade.  But  it 
was  not  the  organ  of  the  Anti-Corn  Law  League. 
The  Anti-Corn  Law  League  did  much  with 
which  it  could  not  agree,  and  it  was  on  the  whole 
rather  frightened  of  this  tremendous  neighbour 
in  Newall's  Buildings.  There  were  three  ways 
to  the  Free  Trade  conversion  of  1 846.  There 
was  Sir  Robert  Peel's  way — his  way  was  a  more 
or  less  sudden  conversion — and  there  was  the 
way  of  the  League,  which  for  eight  years  de- 
manded total  and  immediate  repeal,  and  would 
not  hear  of  anything  short  of  this.  Between  the 
resistant  Peel  on  the  one  hand  and  the  insistent 
League  on  the  other  stood  the  Whig  party, 
which  underwent  a  gradual  conversion  and  was 
in  favour  of  instalments  of  reform.  The  Guardian 
wanted  full  Free  Trade,  and  never  ceased  to 
preach  full  Free  Trade,  but  it  was  always  willing 
to  accept  a  small  fixed  duty  in  exchange  for  the 
hated  sliding  scale,  this  small  fixed  duty  to  be 
improved  away  altogether  as  time  and  oppor- 
tunity served.  In  1841  the  League  intruded 
upon  a  by-election  at  Walsall,  drove  a  Whig 
candidate  out  of  the  field  because  he  could  not 
pledge   himself  to   total   repeal,   and   committed 

82 


what  was  to  John  Edward  Taylor  the  unpardon- 
able offence  of  "  letting  a  Tory  in." 

The  comments  of  the  Guardian  on  this  occur- 
rence speak  what  was  in  this  age  its  permanent 
mind  about  the  doctrinaire  spirit  in  politics  : 

Most  of  our  readers  are  aware  that  the  town  is 
blessed  by  the  presence  and  the  labours  of  a  number 
of  gentlemen  who  call  themselves  philosophical  re- 
formers, and  who  profess  to  regulate  all  their  political 
conduct  by  a  strict  adherence  to  certain  dogmas  which 
they  call  principles,  without  paying  the  slightest  regard 
to  expediency  or  accepting  the  slightest  compromise 
with  persons  of  different  opinions.  Now,  all  this 
sounds  very  fine  in  theory,  but  when  reduced  to 
practice,  whether  in  politics  or  the  ordinary  business 
of  life,  it  is  not  found  to  be  a  remarkably  successful 
course  of  proceeding.  It  is  undoubtedly  true  that  the 
nearest  route  from  one  place  to  another  is  by  a  straight 
line,  but  if  a  coachman  who  regulated  his  conduct  by 
this  principle  and  scorned  expediency  were  to  en- 
deavour to  drive  in  a  straight  line  from  Manchester 
to  London,  his  plan  would  end  very  much  like  most 
of  the  schemes  of  our  political  reformers  ;  he  would 
either  upset  the  coach  or  stick  fast  in  a  ditch  before 
he  had  completed  half  a  mile  of  his  journey. 

Here  is  another  example  of  Taylor's  teaching. 
It  is  taken  from  the  Guardian  of  January  29,  1 840: 

We  hold  that  all  protecting  duties,  whether  im- 
posed on  agricultural  produce  or  on  manufactured 
commodities,  are  either  elusive  or  pernicious — that 
when  they  have  any  effect  at  all  it  is  that  of  directing 
capital  and  labour  into  channels  which  are  compara- 
tively unprofitable.  We  therefore  disapprove  of  any 
duty  upon  the  import  of  corn,  either  fixed  or  fluctu- 
ating, as  being  erroneous  in  principle  and  injurious  to 

83 


the  interests  of  the  people.  At  the  same  time  we 
are  not  amongst  those  who  call  out  for  a  total  repeal 
or  nothing.  We  cannot  conceal  from  ourselves  that 
there  are  interests  and  prejudices  to  be  encountered 
to  which  some  respect  must  be  paid  ;  and  therefore 
as  a  preliminary  step  to  that  perfectly  free  trade  which 
we  believe  to  be  both  desirable  and  necessary  for  the 
country  we  would  not  object  to  the  establishment 
pro  tempore  of  a  really  moderate  fixed  duty. 

§  III 

Within  the  limits  he  thus  defined  for  himself 
John  Edward  Taylor  v^^as  always  true  to  the 
Manchester  policy.  He  did  not,  however,  live 
to  see  it  prevail,  for  his  death  occurred,  at  the 
age  of  53,  early  in  1844.  It  would  be  idle  to 
deny  that  his  management  of  the  Manchester 
Guardian  had  disappointed  the  Radical  party  of 
Manchester.  John  Edward  Taylor  lived  and 
died  a  faithful  Whig.  Unfortunately  his  life  as 
an  editor  lies  on  and  overlies  the  sharp  summit  of 
Whig  history.  He  had  stumbled  and  struggled 
with  Russell  and  Grey  on  the  hard  and  dangerous 
road  to  the  repeal  of  the  Test  and  Corporation 
Act  and  the  Reform  Bill,  and  he  lived  to  wander 
round  and  round  with  Melbourne  in  a  singularly 
unrefreshing  and  miasmic  valley  of  politics. 
When  he  finally  laid  down  his  practised  pen 
the  hope  of  the  future  was  not  with  the  Whigs 
at  all,  but  with  a  new  Liberal  party,  taking  its 
inspiration  from  Peel,  and  through  Peel  from  the 
young  William  Pitt,  who  had  been  the  pupil  of 
Adam  Smith. 

84 


In  journalism,  as  well  as  in  politics,  he  lived 
at  the  fag-end  of  an  epoch.  In  the  very  year 
of  his  death  the  first  telegraph  lines  were  laid, 
and  within  four  years  the  Guardian  was  beginning 
to  contain  sparse  fragments  of  news  which  had 
come  "  by  electric  telegraph."  This  event  re- 
made his  profession.  Other  events  were  break- 
ing up  the  compact  society  in  which  he  had  lived. 
We  might  date  a  decisive  modern  Manchester 
from  about  1840  to  1845,  i^  which  period 
Cobden  risked  and  lost  a  competency  by  colonis- 
ing Victoria  Park.  Or  we  might  say  that  it 
was  definitely  established  in  the  early  fifties, 
when  the  omnibuses  were  splashing  heavily 
every  hour  into  the  provincial  peace  of  Pendleton 
and  Broughton,  and  Central  Manchester  had 
begun  to  exhibit  by  night  the  trance-like  con- 
dition of  a  seaside  pool  left  by  the  receded  tide 
of  population  and  sparsely  inhabited  by  the 
abstruse  life  of  policemen  and  caretakers  and 
cats. 

If  these  changes  had  taken  place  in  the  shape 
of  society  there  were  still  more  definite  changes 
in  its  speed.  The  Whitsuntide  of  1846  was 
notable  for  its  great  increase  in  railway  excursions, 
for  periods  varying  from  one  to  ten  days.  It 
was  estimated  that  in  five  days  of  that  festival 
nearly  16,000  people  had  travelled  from  Man- 
chester to  Liverpool.  New  Brighton  was  be- 
ginning to  be  very  highly  thought  of  at  once 
for  its  air  and  its  amenities,  and  it  was  for  the 
next  twenty  years  a  favourite  resort  of  the  newly 

85 


married.     We  begin  to  hear  for  the  first  time, 
in  1846,  of  Lytham  and  Blackpool. 

The  opening  of  the  second  Free  Trade  Hall 
in  1843  ^^^  been  the  occasion  of  a  curious 
outbreak  of  modernity.  The  hall  was  opened 
with  a  banquet,  and,  when  the  tables  for  the 
banquet  were  spread,  hundreds  of  people  were 
admitted  into  the  galleries  to  feast  vicariously 
on  the  spectacle  of  so  many  knives  and  forks. 
The  silver  was  afterwards  sold  by  auction,  the 
chairman's  carving-knife  fetching  ^3  4^.  as  an 
historical  curiosity.  After  the  banquet  the  League 
threw  the  hall  open  to  the  public  for  a  few  nights, 
charging  them  a  small  sum  to  come  in.  Davies's 
Manchester  Band  was  put  on  the  platform,  and 
innocuous  refreshments  were  to  be  had.  The 
town  exhibited  a  new-born  taste  for  simple 
pleasures.  It  responded  by  "  promenading,"  and 
even  had  the  self-management  to  improve  the 
promenade  into  a  dance.  The  Guardian  sent 
its  reporter  every  night  and  watched  over  the 
proceedings  with  great  benevolence. 

Last  evening  we  visited  the  hall,  and  were  much 
gratified  at  the  lively  scene  before  us.  Numerous 
groups  were  promenading  on  the  floor  ;  others  were 
seated  taking  lemonade  or  coffee.  Davies's  really 
good  band,  stationed  on  the  dais,  was  playing  lively 
airs  ;  the  place  was  agreeably  warm,  and  the  scene 
was  of  the  most  pleasing  and  animated  character. 
In  a  while  the  band  commenced  playing  a  favourite 
set  of  quadrilles  ;  three  sets  of  dancers  were  formed  as 
if  by  magic.  We  were  much  pleased  to  observe  the 
decorum  and  propriety  and  the  ease  with  which  the 

86 


dancers  of  both  sexes  went  through  the  evolution 
of  the  figure.  .  .  .  Had  we  such  spacious  halls 
permanently  in  our  large  commercial  and  manufac- 
turing towns  and  so  dedicated  to  innocent  pleasures 
there  can  be  no  doubt  that  their  citizens  would  soon 
acquire  a  taste  for  simple  social  fetes  equal  to  that  which 
characterises  our  Continental  neighbours. 

John  Edward  Taylor  was  succeeded  in  the 
editorship  by  his  eldest  son.  This  son,  Russell 
Scott  Taylor,  was  of  such  advanced  and  even 
premature  capacity  that  he  was  thought  to  be 
able  to  take  his  father's  place  at  the  early  age 
of  eighteen  years.  Oxford  and  Cambridge  were 
not  at  that  time  open  to  one  of  so  pronounced  a 
Nonconformity,  but,  even  so,  the  cause  of  higher 
education  was  not  desperate.  Especially  was  it 
not  desperate  in  Manchester.  Hardly  even  by 
searching  can  we  find  the  end  of  the  personal 
riches  of  Manchester  in  the  day  when  Russell 
Scott  Taylor  was  a  maturing  boy  in  his  father's 
house  at  Cheetham  Hill.  In  1840  Manchester 
New  College  returned  from  York  to  its  birth- 
place in  Manchester,  and  it  is  an  impressive 
fact,  and  one  which  might  well  cause  us  to  re- 
consider our  latter  state,  that  while  Manchester 
was  re-shaping  the  politics  of  England  such  men 
as  James  Martineau,  Francis  William  Newman, 
and  William  Gaskell  were  included  in  its  academic 
citizenship,  Martineau  teaching  philosophy  and 
political  economy,  Newman  Latin  and  Gaskell 
English  history  and  literature  in  a  sectarian 
academy  in  Grosvenor  Square. 

87 


This  rich  professorate  was  attended  by  Russell 
Scott  Taylor.  It  was  also  attended  by  his 
younger  brother,  the  second  John  Edward  Taylor, 
who  was  destined  to  a  much  larger  and  more 
enduring  place  in  the  history  of  the  Guardian. 
For  the  brilliant  promise  of  Russell  Scott  Taylor's 
life  was  not  allowed  to  ripen  into  a  corresponding 
performance.  He  died  of  typhoid  fever  in  1 848 
in  the  twenty-fourth  year  of  his  age,  and  about 
a  year  after  his  marriage  with  Miss  Emily  Acland. 
To  his  ability  for  public  life  he  had  joined  much 
amiability  and  earnestness  of  private  character, 
and  during  his  editorship  of  the  Guardian  he 
continued  to  be  an  assiduous  teacher  in  the 
Lower  Mosley  Street  Sunday  School.  The 
younger  John  Edward  Taylor,  who  had  been 
born  in  1830  and  was  now  only  eighteen  years 
old,  was  too  young  to  be  the  immediate  successor 
of  his  very  exceptional  brother.  From  Man- 
chester New  College  he  passed  on  to  the  Uni- 
versity of  Bonn.  On  his  return  from  Germany 
he  was  called  to  the  Bar  at  the  Inner  Temple, 
but  he  returned  to  Manchester  in  time  to  take 
a  large  share  in  the  newspaper  developments 
which  we  shall  find  occurring  about  the  middle 
fifties,  and  to  begin  his  long  term  of  office  first 
in  the  immediate  and  afterwards  in  the  ultimate 
headship  of  the  Manchester  Guardian. 


88 


V;  WHIGGISM 


CHAPTER     V 

JVhiggism 

FROM  1848  until  1 86 1  the  Manchester  Guar- 
dian was  edited  by  Jeremiah  Garnett,  the 
junior  partner  of  its  first  proprietor.  We  left 
Garnett  some  years  behind  us  in  our  narrative,  the 
enjant  terrible  of  journalism  in  Manchester,  a 
satirist  and  one  who  dipped  his  pen  in  acid,  some- 
what of  a  swashbuckler  and,  but  for  the  grace  of 
God,  a  duellist.  We  saw  him  join  the  Manchester 
Anti-Corn  Law  Association  in  the  momentous 
company  of  Cobden.  He  had  been  powerfully 
at  the  back  of  the  incorporation  of  Manchester, 
and  when  John  Edward  Taylor  died  he  took  the 
vacant  seat  on  the  City  Council.  He  was  now 
at  the  age  of  fifty-five,  in  the  middle  years  of  life, 
which  were  to  carry  him  slowly  and  insensibly 
to  an  old  age  of  much  moral  and  physical  beauty. 
On  the  political  side,  however,  something  unto- 
ward had  happened  to  him  at  a  date  which  we 
cannot  precisely  determine.  The  same  thing  had 
happened  to  many  illustrious  and  invaluable 
Whigs,  and  was  much  commented  upon  by  con- 
temporary Radicals,  who  called  them  cases  of 
*'  finality,"  having  their  origin  in  overstrain  in- 
curred at  some  period  or  other  during  the  struggle 
for  Reform  and  not  noticed  at  the  time,  but 
causing  now  a  kind  of  lethargy  accompanied 
by   a  marked   twisting  of  the  neck   backwards. 

91 


One  may  read  of  its  effects  in  the  life  of  Lord 
John  Russell.  Garnett  had  it.  Garnett  was, 
moreover,  a  water-tight  Free-trader.  Free  Trade 
with  him  did  not  spill  over  into  international  senti- 
ment. Writing  to  Cobden  in  1857,  Bright 
makes  some  comments  on  the  length  to  which 
he  and  his  friend  had  drawn  ahead  of  the  public 
opinion  of  their  time.  They  had  totally  changed 
the  creed  and  the  policy  of  England  on  all 
questions  relating  to  commerce,  Customs  duties, 
and  taxation.  They  had  established  the  notion 
of  colonial  self-government,  and  had  persuaded 
all  parties  of  the  need  for  a  wider  measure  of 
Parliamentary  reform.  So  far  Bright  was  able 
to  congratulate  the  Manchester  School  on  things 
definitely  done.  He  was  on  more  doubtful 
ground  when  he  claimed  that  the  ''  School  " 
had  also  effected  a  revolution  on  questions  re- 
lating to  the  Church.  No  one  nowadays  rends 
his  garments  as  Bright  habitually  rent  his  at 
the  mere  phenomenon  and  spectacle  of  a  bishop 
in  the  House  of  Lords  or  even  in  a  'bus.  In  the 
region  of  international  co-operation  and  good- 
will he  admitted  that  the  "  School  "  had  so  far 
failed.  In  this  he  was  right,  and  it  is  a  curious 
historical  fact  that  the  age  of  the  fifties,  which 
watched  Gladstone  by  his  successive  Budgets 
completing  the  work  of  Peel  and  carrying  the 
Free  Trade  principle  into  every  cellar  and 
passage  of  our  fiscal  system,  should  also  have 
been  contemporaneously  the  period  of  some  of 
the  highest  handling  and   the  highest  prancing 

92 


JKRKMlAll  (.ARM-IT 

First  printer,   biisiiu-ss  man.tgcr  unci  rrporter  of  tlii-   Moiiclicstir  (JuarJia)!,  ami  frum 

18+8  till   18G1  its  Editor. 


our  foreign  policy  has  ever  known.  It  was  the 
age  of  Palmerston  and  Palmerston's  chis  Romanus. 
Garnett  was  of  the  school  of  Palmerston, 
and  he  made  the  Guardian  an  organ  of  the 
Palmerstonian  Liberalism.  He  did  not  mean 
by  Free  Trade  the  larger  millennial  things  which 
Cobden  meant,  and,  though  the  Guardian  by 
leading  articles  and  by  reports,  and  still  more 
by  its  great  influence  over  moderate  opinion  in 
Lancashire  had  done  the  League  incalculable 
service,  both  John  Edward  Taylor  and  Garnett, 
and  Garnett  perhaps  more  particularly,  had  been 
rather  with  the  movement  than  of  it.  Ten 
years  after  the  victory  of  1846  we  find  Garnett 
excessively  irritated  by  the  ghost  of  the  League, 
It  still  walked.  There  is  a  passage  in  a  letter 
by  Cobden,  of  1857,  which  indicates  that  the 
League  was  still  an  embodied  thing,  and  Cobden 
seems  to  suggest  that  this  was  against  his  better 
judgment.  It  had  been  heard  to  boast  that  it 
still  kept  the  key  to  the  representation  of  Man- 
chester at  its  home  in  Newall's  Buildings.  Its 
older  local  members  were  men  who  had  seen 
what  they  had  seen,  and  it  would  have  been  a 
miracle  if  they  had  not  succumbed  to  the  last 
temptation  of  virtuous  spirits  and  fallen  victims 
to  some  spiritual  pride,  assuming,  moreover, 
the  air  of  being  the  last  Romans  left  alive.  The 
Athenian  citizen  who  voted  for  the  banishment 
of  Aristides  said  he  did  not  know  anything  of 
that  statesman,  but  it  irritated  him  to  hear  him 
everywhere  called  "  the  just."     And  then  there 

93 


was  Bright.  Bright  had  been  made  member  for 
Manchester  in  1847,  ^^  ^  reward  for  his  services 
to  the  cause  of  Free  Trade.  He  had  been  a 
nuisance  to  three  Liberal  Prime  Ministers,  to 
Lord  John  Russell,  to  Lord  Aberdeen,  and 
Lord  Palmerston.  He  had  been  violently  op- 
posed to  the  Crimean  War.  It  must  be  ad- 
mitted that  Bright's  conception  of  the  part  of  a 
conscientious  objector  was  extremely  austere. 
His  was  not  the  politer  spirit  which  declines 
any  part  in  actual  hostilities  but  puts  in  double 
time  with  work  of  national  importance.  He 
washed  his  hands  of  the  whole  business,  and 
would  have  no  more  to  do  with  the  curing  than 
the  killing. 

In  this  frame  of  mind  he  and  Cobden  ap- 
proached, in  1857,  their  respective  constituents 
of  Manchester  and  the  West  Riding.  In  Man- 
chester the  Liberal  party  was  split  into  two  equal 
halves.  The  Palmerston  Liberals  tried  to  secure 
Robert  Lowe,  but  eventually  selected  as  their 
candidates  Sir  John  Potter  and  Mr.  Aspinwall 
Turner.  Bright  was  seriously  ill  during  the 
election  in  Italy,  and  Milner  Gibson,  his  colleague 
in  the  representation  of  Manchester,  bore  the 
brunt  of  the  fighting,  with  occasional  help  from 
Cobden  who  paid  flying  visits  from  Huddersfield. 
The  Guardian,  in  strong  and  sometimes  harsh 
terms,  supported  Potter  and  Turner,  and  was 
bitterly  reproached  by  Cobden.  As  many  Con-  '' 
servatives  voted  for  the  Palmerston  candidates  as 
were  necessary  to  determine  the  result.    The  news 

94 


was  sent  to  Bright  in  Venice.  He  was  at  the 
bottom  of  the  poll,  with  Milner  Gibson  also 
defeated.  Cobden,  who  had  had  the  influence  of 
the  Leeds  Mercury  against  him,  as  Bright  had  had 
that  of  the  Manchester  Guardian,  went  down  in 
the  West  Riding.  Fox  was  thrown  out  at  Oldham, 
Sir  Elkanah  Armitage  at  Salford,  and  Miall,  the 
leader  of  the  forty  Dissenters  then  in  Parliament, 
was  rejected  at  Rochdale.  Most  of  them  were 
quickly  returned  to  Parliament.  In  a  few  weeks 
Birmingham  had  snapped  up  Bright,  and  in 
securing  Bright  secured  also  the  Liberal  lead  for 
the  next  thirty  years  of  politics. 

The  correspondence  of  Cobden  was  sore  and 
sombre  for  many  weeks  on  this  subject  of  Man- 
chester. He  saw  the  beginnings  of  a  new 
feudalism  in  Portland  Street. 

The  honest  and  independent  course  taken  by  the 
people  at  Birmingham,  their  exemption  from  aristo- 
cratic snobbery,  and  their  fair  appreciation  of  a  demo- 
cratic son  of  the  people  confirm  me  in  the  opinion 
I  have  always  had  that  the  social  and  political  state 
of  that  town  is  far  more  healthy  than  that  of  Man- 
chester ;  and  it  arises  from  the  fact  that  the  industry 
of  the  hardware  district  is  carried  on  by  small  manu- 
facturers, employing  a  few  men  and  boys  each,  some- 
times only  an  apprentice  or  two  ;  whilst  the  great 
capitalists  of  Manchester  form  an  aristocracy,  in- 
dividual members  of  which  wield  an  influence  over 
sometimes  two  thousand  persons.  The  former  state 
of  society  is  more  natural  and  healthy  in  a  moral  and 
political  sense.  There  is  a  freer  intercourse  between 
all  classes  than  in  the  Lancashire  town,  where  a  great 
and  impassable  gulf  separates  the  workman  from  his 

95 


employer.  The  great  capitalist  class  formed  an  ex- 
cellent basis  for  the  Anti-Corn  Law  movement,  for 
they  had  inexhaustible  purses  which  they  opened 
freely  in  a  contest  where  not  only  their  pecuniary 
interests  but  their  pride  as  "  an  order  "  was  at  stake. 
But  I  very  much  doubt  whether  such  a  state  of  society 
is  favourable  to  a  democratic  political  movement.  .  .  . 
If  Bright  should  recover  his  health  and  be  able  to  head 
a  party  for  Parliamentary  reform,  in  my  opinion 
Birmingham  will  be  a  better  home  for  him  than 
Manchester. 

The  election  of  1857  is  interesting  for  the 
first  ghmpse  it  gives  us  of  the  coming  age  of 
Manchester  LiberaUsm.  On  Bright's  platform 
at  the  Free  Trade  Hall  appeared  John  Slagg, 
and  the  name  of  John  Slagg  carries  us  down 
to  the  fabulous  eighties.  We  are  plainly  ap- 
proaching the  days  of  the  gravelled  drives  of 
Victoria  Park  and  Prestwich  ;  of  the  carriages 
with  two  horses  which  flashed  their  owners  to 
great  ovations  at  public  meetings  and  carried 
them  home  through  the  torch-lighted  night  of 
victory  and,  not  infrequently,  defeat  at  the  polls  ; 
of  the  men  who  sat  in  the  wide-back  pews  of 
Dissenting  chapels  and  received  the  ministrations 
of  Guinness  Rogers,  entertained  Dr.  Dale  when 
he  came  to  preach,  were  chosen  by  Mr.  Glad- 
stone to  second  the  Address,  and  were,  in  short, 
the  individuals  produced  by  Individualism.  We 
shall  see  the  white  hats  of  these  Gladstonians 
and  the  side  whiskers  dimly  distinguishable  on 
the  coasts  of  their  powerful,  sagacious  faces. 
We  have  heard  of  John   Slagg  already,  and  at 

96 


any  moment  we  might  come  across  Hugh  Mason 
or  Henry  Lee.     Or  Leake  and  Agnew  ! 

§11 

The  Guardian  fought  the  election  of  1857 
as  a  daily  paper.  This  large  development  oc- 
curred in  1855  ;  it  was  one  of  the  many  results 
of  the  high  social  constructivity  of  the  Glad- 
stonian  Budgets.  In  1853  Mr.  Gladstone 
abolished  the  duty  on  soap  and  reduced  133 
other  taxes,  giving  a  total  remission  of  taxation 
of  over  five  millions,  and  Milner  Gibson  carried 
against  the  Government  a  motion  for  the  repeal 
of  the  advertisement  duty,  which  now  stood  at 
eighteenpence.  In  1855  the  last  penny  of  the 
newspaper  duty  was  repealed.  The  duty  on 
paper  survived  until  1861.  It  was  the  last  of  the 
**  taxes  on  knowledge,"  and  its  abolition  caused 
a  constitutional  crisis,  the  House  of  Lords  making 
not  certainly  the  last,  but  the  last  but  one  of  its 
attempts  to  block  the  progress  of  a  Money  Bill. 
But  the  relief  of  1855  was  sufficient  to  ripen  the 
Guardian  to  the  full  perfections  of  the  daily 
status.  The  issue  of  June  16,  1855,  contains  the 
following  announcement  ; 

The  bill  for  the  abolition  of  the  compulsory  stamp 
duty  on  newspapers  has  now  passed  both  Houses  of 
Parliament  and  only  waits  the  Royal  Assent.  We  are 
therefore  able  to  announce  that  the  Daily  Publication 
of  the  Guardian  will  commence  on  Monday  the  second 
of  July  next.  The  price,  when  unstamped,  will  be, 
as  we  have  already  stated.  Twopence,  instead  of  five- 

97  G 


pence  as  at  present  ;  in  other  words,  we  shall  furnish 
our  readers  with  six  papers  per  week  for  a  shilling 
instead  of  two  for  tenpence. 

On  July  2,  1855,  the  change  was  accordingly 
made,  and  two  years  later,  in  1857,  the  price 
was  reduced  to  one  penny.  The  intelligence 
actively  behind  these  critical  operations  was  that 
of  the  second  John  Edward  Taylor,  who  had  now 
settled  in  Manchester  and  was  taking  his  part  in 
newspaper  management  in  a  period  of  great 
quickening.  In  1861,  on  the  retirement  of 
Mr.  Garnett  (who  died  at  Sale  in  1870),  he 
entered  upon  the  undivided  control  of  the  paper. 
The  full  concert-pitch  of  London  journalism  be- 
came the  object  of  his  management.  As  early  as 
1856  the  Guardian  had  made  a  great  effort  to 
secure  a  better  report  of  Parliament.  In  this  it 
failed,  and  for  several  years  yet  it  had  to  be  con- 
tent with  the  report  prepared  for  all  the  provincial 
papers  by  the  Intelligence  Department  of  the 
monopolistic  telegraph  companies.  The  report 
of  Mr.  Gladstone's  Budget  speech  of  i860  sent 
out  by  this  agency  was  a  scandal  of  inefficiency, 
and  all  the  provincial  press  agitated  strongly  for 
the  nationalization  of  the  telegraphs.  In  1870, 
however,  Mr.  Taylor  took  the  leading  part  in  a 
newspaper  development  of  great  importance — 
the  establishment  of  the  Press  Association.  In 
1868  the  Guardian  rented  from  the  Post  Office 
two  private  wires,  opened  a  London  office,  and 
obtained  entrance  for  its  descriptive  writer  into 
the   Gallery   of  the   House   of  Commons.     The 

98 


London  Letter  began,  and  numbered  among 
its  earliest  contributors  Tom  Taylor,  the  drama- 
tist and  friend  of  Thackeray,  who  afterwards 
became  editor  of  Punch  ;  M'Cullagh  Torrens, 
the  member  for  Finsbury  ;  and  Tom  Hughes, 
the  author  of  Tom  Brown's  School  Days. 

The  Guardian  showed  even  greater  enter- 
prise in  the  following  year,  when  the  Franco- 
German  War  began.  Mr.  Taylor  appointed  and 
despatched  his  own  staff  of  war  correspondents. 
One  of  them  was  Mr.  G.  T.  Robinson,  an  archi- 
tect, the  art-critic  of  the  paper,  and  the  father 
of  the  poetess,  Mary  F.  Robinson,  afterwards 
Madame  Darmesteter  and  now  Madame  Duclaux. 
Another  was  General  Cluseret.  Robinson,  who 
was  shut  up  in  Metz,  and  improvised  a  method 
of  sending  his  messages  out  of  the  city  by  bal- 
loons, afterwards  published  a  book  on  his  ex- 
periences. The  war  service  of  the  Manchester 
Guardian  stood  comparison  with  that  of  the 
London  papers.  The  morning  trains  into  Man- 
chester were  as  early  and  as  well  informed  as 
the  morning  trains  into  London,  and  at  the  close 
of  the  Franco-German  War  the  Guardian  had  a 
national  name. 

Mr.  John  Edward  Taylor,  who  in  1861  had 
married  the  youngest  daughter  of  Mr.  R.  W. 
Warner,  of  Thetford,  Norfolk,  presided  over 
these  large  operations  partly  from  Manchester 
and  partly  from  London,  where  he  had  gone  to 
live.  The  editorship  in  Manchester  went  for  a 
few    years   virtually   into    commission.     Mr.    R. 

99 


Dowman,  a  man  of  much  curious  learning,  who 
is  still   remembered   for  the   accomplishment   of 
writing  the  whole  of  a  long  leader  on  a  single 
slip  of  paper,  took  a  large  share  of  editorial  duty. 
Another  share  was  taken  by  Mr.  John  Couper, 
who  lived  until  modern  times,  and  whose  beauty 
of  character,  coupled  with  great  journalistic  piety 
and   the   further   circumstance   that   he   acted   as 
a  sort  of  "  father  "  to  Mr.  Scott  in  his  early  days 
of    editorship,    have    canonized    him    in    Cross 
Street.     A  third  part  was  taken  by  Mr.  H.  M. 
Acton  (the  father  of  Mr.  Justice  Acton),  a  man 
of  scholarship  and  wit,  though  somewhat  cramped 
as  a  writer  by  his  own  severe  classical  standards, 
and  yet  another  part  by  Mr.  J.  M.  Maclean,  who 
had    already    won    distinction    as    editor    of   the 
Bombay  Gazette^  and  was  later  still  to  exhibit  to 
Parliament  the  spectacle  of  a  Conservative  mem- 
ber   gravely  embarrassed    by  persistent    Liberal 
views.     Mr.  R.  W.  Spencer,  who  was  at  one  time 
chief  reporter  and  for  many  years  the  chief  sub- 
editor of  the   paper,  joined   it   about   this  time. 
He  was  a  man  of  much  ability  and  judgment, 
and    his   long   tenure   of  an    important    position 
in   its   service   counted   for   a   great   deal   in   the 
progress    of   the    Guardian.     Mr.    Peter    Allen, 
brother-in-law  of  the  second  John  Edward  Taylor 
and  the  father  of  Mr.  Russell  Allen,  the  present 
proprietor  of  the  Manchester  Evening  News,  was 
the  shrewd  and  genial  business  manager.      Mr. 
G.  V.  Marsh  had  succeeded  John  Harland  in  the 
office  of  chief  reporter.      The   Guardian  was  a 

ICO 


daily  paper,  but  there  still  clung  to  it  some  of 
the  atmosphere  of  its  bi-weekly  days.  It  was 
the  product  of  long,  leisurely  afternoons.  Its 
leader-writers  withheld  their  hands  from  the 
news  of  the  current  night,  and  went  home,  like 
barristers,  on  reasonable  evening  trains. 


lOI 


VI  :   THE  HAPPY  LIBERALS 


C  H  A  P  T  E  R     V  I 

The  Happy  Liberals 

§1 

IT  was  among  the  men,  and  into  the  conditions 
described  in  the  last  chapter,  that  there  ar- 
rived in   1 871  a  new  editorial  recruit  in    the 
person  of  Charles  Prestwich  Scott. 

The  present  proprietor  and  editor  of  the 
Manchester  Guardian  was  born  at  Bath  in  1846. 
His  father  and  his  grandfather  were  both  named 
Russell  Scott.  His  grandfather  was  the  Rev. 
Russell  Scott,  a  well-known  Unitarian  minister, 
who  was  for  forty-five  years  in  charge  of  the 
High  Street  Chapel  at  Portsmouth,  and  was  a 
sort  of  bishop  of  his  denomination.  To  the 
Rev.  Russell  Scott  three  children  were  born. 
The  eldest  died  in  infancy.  The  second  one, 
Sophia  Russell  Scott,  has  already  entered  into 
our  narrative  as  the  first  wife  of  John  Edward 
Taylor,  the  founder  of  the  Manchester  Guardian. 
Charles  Prestwich  Scott  is  therefore  the  nephew 
by  marriage  of  John  Edward  Taylor,  and  has  a 
more  distant  blood  relationship  with  him  arising 
from  the  circumstance  that  John  Edward  Taylor 
and  his  wife  were  first  cousins. 

The  third  child  of  the  Rev.  Russell  Scott 
was  a  son,  Russell  Scott.  He  became  a  mer- 
chant in  London,  and  married  Isabella  Prest- 
wich, a  woman  of  much  beauty  and  talent, 
who  lived  at  her  father's  house  in  South  Lambeth, 

105 


though  she  was  descended  from  an  old  Man- 
chester family  settled  at  one  time  at  Hulme  Hall. 
Her  brother,  Sir  Joseph  Prestwich,  became  Pro- 
fessor of  Geology  at  Oxford,  and  she  herself, 
ending  her  days  at  Denton,  near  to  Manchester, 
is  well  remembered  there  for  her  devoted  spirit 
and  by  the  social  and  educational  institutions 
which  she  gave  to  the  place.  Russell  Scott  suc- 
ceeded in  business.  He  retired  in  early  middle 
life,  and  devoted  himself  to  the  education  of  a 
large  family  and  to  philanthropy.  It  was  largely 
by  his  assistance  that  Miss  Mary  Carpenter 
established,  in  1852,  the  Kingswood  Reforma- 
tory School  near  Bristol,  one  of  the  first  in- 
stitutions of  its  kind  in  the  country,  and  the 
management  of  this  school  occupied  much  of 
his  time  during  the  years  in  which  he  lived 
with  his  family  at  Bath.  Charles  Prestwich 
Scott  is  the  eighth  of  his  nine  children,  of  whom 
the  ninth  died  in  infancy.  His  eldest  brother, 
Russell  Scott,  who  died  in  1908,  was  a  merchant 
in  London,  and  a  steady  and  generous  friend  of 
the  Liberal  party  and  of  many  good  causes. 
Another  brother,  the  Rev.  Lawrence  Scott,  has 
for  many  years  been  the  Unitarian  minister  at 
Denton. 

Charles  Prestwich  Scott  was  educated  at  private 
schools  and  by  a  private  tutor  in  the  Isle  of 
Wight.  One  of  his  masters  was  the  Rev.  Joseph 
Hutton,  brother  of  R.  H.  Hutton,  of  the  Spec- 
tator^ and  another,  the  Rev.  Charles  Pritchard, 
afterwards  professor  of  astronomy  at  Cambridge. 

106 


His  Nonconformist  descent  and  his  own  Non- 
conformist attitude — for  he  refused  to  be  bound 
to  attend  college  chapel,  though  in  point  of 
fact  he  always  went — were  a  difficulty  in  the 
way  of  his  entrance  to  one  of  the  old  univer- 
sities, but  in  1865  he  obtained  admission  to 
Corpus  Christi,  Oxford,  on  the  result  of  the 
scholarship  examination,  no  difficulty  being  raised 
against  him  at  that  very  liberal  college.  His 
recreation  at  the  University  was  rowing,  and  in 
his  last  year  he  was  captain  of  his  college  boat. 
He  left  Oxford  in  1869  with  a  first  in  **  Greats  " 
and  an  invitation  from  his  cousin,  the  second 
John  Edward  Taylor,  to  join  the  staff  of  the 
Manchester  Guardian.  As  a  further  and  more 
definite  preparation  for  his  work  in  Manchester 
he  went  to  Edinburgh  and  served  for  a  year 
in  the  office  of  the  Scotsman^  under  the  illustrious 
Alexander  Russel.  In  the  spring  of  1871  he 
came  to  Manchester  just  in  time  to  be  present 
at  the  festivities  which  celebrated  the  jubilee 
of  the  Manchester  Guardian,  In  1872,  at  the 
age  of  twenty-five,  Mr.  Scott  entered  upon  the 
editorship  which  has  enriched  and  ornamented 
all  Liberal  causes  the  world  over,  and  which, 
continuing  to  this  day,  not  only  without  failure  or 
abatement,  but  with  a  still  continued  ripening 
and  expansion  of  powers,  promises  to  endow 
humanity  with  another  example  of  the  courage 
and  capacity  of  advanced  years,  and  to  add  one 
more  name  to  the  world's  list  of  grand  old  men. 
Mr.  Scott  was  married  in  1874  to  Miss  Rachel 

107 


Susan  Cook,  the  daughter  of  Dr.  John  Cook, 
professor  of  ecclesiastical  history  in  the  University 
of  St.  Andrews  and  one  time  Moderator  of  the 
Established  Church  of  Scotland.  Mrs.  Scott  was 
one  of  the  seven  original  students  of  the  College 
for  Women  at  Hitchin,  which  afterwards  de- 
veloped into  Girton  College,  Cambridge.  She 
took  the  Cambridge  Classical  Tripos  with  a  dis- 
tinction which  was  not  equalled  for  some  time 
by  any  other  woman  student.  On  her  marriage 
with  Mr.  Scott  she  came  to  live  in  Manchester, 
and  gave  all  the  powers  she  could  to  the  service 
of  the  city.  She  was  one  of  the  founders  of  the 
College  in  Brunswick  Street  for  the  Higher 
Education  of  Women,  which  is  now  merged  in 
the  Manchester  University.  She  succeeded  Miss 
Becker  on  the  Manchester  School  Board.  Mrs. 
Scott  was  in  intimate  touch  with  her  husband's 
editorial  work,  was  with  him  in  all  the  decisions, 
and  particularly  the  decisions  on  the  Irish  ques- 
tion in  1886  and  the  South  African  question  in 
1899,  which  liberalized  the  Guardian,  and  she 
had  much  to  do  with  developing  and  improving 
the  department  of  book-reviewing,  which  began 
to  grow  famous  in  her  time. 

Mrs.  Scott  died  in  1905,  but  her  influence 
has  lived  on  in  the  subsequent  history  of  the 
paper,  and  her  spirit,  critical  yet  enthusiastic, 
is  ingrained  in  its  spirit.  There  is  a  memory 
of  her  which  is  still  probably  treasured  among 
the  moral  possessions  of  some  who  were  present 
at  the  historic  meeting  in  the  St.  James's  Hall, 

108 


Manchester,  in  the  autumn  of  1899,  called  to 
protest  against  the  South  African  War.  She  was 
then  deeply  worn  by  the  heavy  physical  suffer- 
ings of  her  last  years,  but  she  was  present  at 
that  meeting,  and  in  the  company  of  the  son 
of  Bright  and  the  daughter  of  Gladstone  she  took 
with  Morley,  Courtney  and  her  husband  all 
her  share  of  its  martyrdoms.  She  went  through 
the  ordeal  of  the  night  seeming  hardly  a  corporeal 
presence  at  all  ;  rather  a  flame  of  pure  spirit — 
purified. 

Mr.  and  Mrs.  Scott's  daughter  married  Mr. 
C.  E.  Montague,  who  joined  the  editorial  staff' 
of  the  paper  from  Balliol  in  1890,  and  is  ac- 
counted one  of  the  highest  ornaments  of  English 
journalism.  Their  eldest  son,  Lawrence  Prest- 
wich  Scott,  died  in  1908.  He  had  been  on  the 
editorial  staff  of  the  paper  for  seven  years,  and 
was  promising  to  contribute  high  moral  and 
intellectual  qualities  to  the  enrichment  of  its 
future  history.  Two  other  sons,  John  Russell 
Scott  and  Edward  Taylor  Scott,  are  in  the  service 
of  the  paper,  the  former  as  its  business  manager, 
the  latter  as  a  leader-writer  giving  special  atten- 
tion to  economic  questions. 

§11 

The  opening  of  the  London  office  and  the 
private  wire,  the  appointment  of  a  Parliamentary 
writer,  the  despatch  of  war  correspondents  armed 
with  blank  cheques  to  the  Franco-German  War, 
and  the  appointment  of  Mr.  C.   P.  Scott  are  a 

109 


group  of  events  standing  in  a  close  circle  around 
the  year  1868,  and  it  was  in  this  year  also  that 
the  Liberal  party  arose,  new  and  splendid,  out  of 
the  shattered  fragments  of  the  Whigs,  the  Peelites, 
the  Palmerstonians,  and  the  Manchester  School. 
For  the  next  eighteen  years  a  party  composed 
of  all  these  elements,  and  socially  so  catholic 
that  it  included  dukes  and  included  dustmen, 
was  to  find  its  full  satisfaction  and  felicity,  its 
bond  of  union  and  well  of  inspiration,  in  the 
matchless  public  and  private  character  of  Mr. 
Gladstone.  The  political  Nonconformists,  the 
Congregationalists,  the  Baptists,  and  Unitarians, 
and  all  their  prophets  and  pastors,  their  Dales, 
Parkers,  Spurgeons,  McLarens,  and  Martineaus, 
were  of  this  party  to  a  man,  Mr.  Forster's  Edu- 
cation Act  vexing  them  but  not  permanently 
driving  them  away.  There  was  a  liberal  sprink- 
ling of  eminent  Churchmen.  Jowett,  of  Balliol, 
belonged  to  it,  and  when  the  first  working  miner 
appeared  in  Parliament  in  the  person  of  Thomas 
Burt,  he  also  was  of  it. 

Its  principal  opponents  were  Beer  and  Bible, 
the  alliance  of  which  was  much  commented 
upon  during  and  after  the  election  of  1874. 
At  the  hands  of  Beer  and  Bible  the  Liberal  party 
of  those  days  sustained  heavy  and  bitter  defeats, 
but  these  experiences  were  only  the  beating  of 
the  weather  outside  the  house.  There  was  warmth 
and  company  inside.  There  was  no  little  self- 
righteousness.  Dr.  Dale,  who  bitterly  lamented 
the  break-up  of  the  Liberal  party  in   1886,  has 

1 10 


said  somewhere  that  it  had  ceased  to  be  a  party 
and  had  become  a  church.  It  was  richer  than 
almost  any  party  has  been  before  or  since  in 
leadership.  Its  members  of  the  rank  and  file 
sat  them  down  beneath  a  canopy  of  character 
and  genius  which  could  muster  the  organ  tones 
of  morals  and  politics  or  admit  beams  of  celestial 
light.  When  Mr.  Gladstone  threatened  to  re- 
tire from  the  leadership  in  1876,  Bright,  Forster, 
Lowe,  and  Hartington  were  his  companions  on 
the  front  Opposition  bench,  and  each  one  was  a 
possible  leader.  Harcourt  and  Henry  James 
were  not  thought  weighty  enough.  Chamber- 
lain and  Dilke  were  a  little  too  young.  Mr. 
Gladstone's  retirement  did  not  last  long.  In  two 
or  three  years  the  Eastern  Question  arose,  and  a 
perfectly  new  phenomenon  known  as  a  "  Mid- 
lothian campaign,"  heated  up  by  railway  station 
oratory  at  every  stopping-place  between  Queens- 
ferry  and  Edinburgh,  arose  in  English  politics, 
not  a  little  to  the  perturbation  of  Queen  Victoria, 
who  took  grave  exception  to  this  apotheosis  of  a 
subject.  Liberal  associations  assembled  on  rail- 
way platforms  towards  noon,  enjoyed  two  minutes 
of  concentrated  lion-gazing,  and  dispersed  when 
the  train  moved  on,  totally  unfitted  for  the  busi- 
ness of  the  rest  of  the  day.  The  Manchester 
Guardian^  besides  reporting  Mr.  Gladstone,  took 
to  describing  him.  In  1880  local  members  of 
Parliament  were  telling  their  audiences  that 
Mr.  Gladstone  had  reached  his  seventieth  year. 
After  that  he  became  legendary.     Elderly  men 

1 1 1 


were  presented  by  their  families  at  Christmas 
with  the  acceptable  gift  of  a  piece  of  wood 
guaranteed  by  the  dealer  to  be  a  chip  from  his 
axe.  In  the  last  years  of  his  life  he  did  little 
to  alter  or  modify  the  system  of  England,  but 
the  example  of  these  years  kept  her  soul  alive. 

In  circumstances  like  these  the  problems  of 
Liberal  editorship  with  which  Mr.  Scott  had  to 
deal  in  his  first  ten  years  of  office  were  not  diffi- 
cult. But  the  second  Gladstonian  Government, 
of  1880,  had  not  been  in  power  very  long  when 
it  became  apparent  that  a  fissure  was  developing 
in  the  Liberal  party.  On  the  one  side  were 
Hartington,  Goschen,  and  the  Whigs  ;  on  the 
other,  Chamberlain  and  the  Midland  Radicals 
and  the  impatient  youth  of  the  party.  These 
two  sections  began  to  manoeuvre  against  one 
another  for  the  control  of  the  next  few  years  of 
politics.  Chamberlain  became  the  hero  of  pro- 
vincial Liberalism,  though  there  are  many  elderly 
Liberals  living  to-day  who  can  boast  that  they 
never  liked  him,  and  can  quote  the  very  words 
they  used  to  this  effect  in  the  street  outside  his 
most  spell-bound  meetings.  He  concocted  an 
"  unauthorized  programme  "  which  promised  the 
Liberal  party  not  only  years  of  office  but,  what 
is  even  more  important  to  a  party,  work  to  do 
while  it  was  in  office.  It  was  totally  to  re- 
shape the  rural  life  of  England,  a  work  in  which 
all  Radical  manufacturers,  all  people  who  lived 
themselves  in  cities  and  towns,  and  indeed  every- 
body except  landlords,  squires,  and  clergymen, 

1 12 


could  join  with  the  utmost  satisfaction  to  his 
party  interests  and  no  personal  risk  to  his  private 
status  and  fortune,  however  far  the  process 
went.  The  new  rural  constituencies  responded 
by  returning  many  Liberal  members  at  the 
election  of  1885.  Mr.  Glijdstonc  chose  this 
moment  of  moments  in  party  history  to  be 
converted  to  Home  Rule.  He  put  the  Non- 
conformist masses  of  the  Liberal  party  to  a  severe 
trial  of  faith  and  temper.  Instead  of  uprooting 
the  land  laws  and  disestablishing  the  Church, 
they  were  to  face  the  prospect  of  twenty  years 
of  opposition  for  the  sake  of  a  people  whom 
they  knew  to  be  Papists  and  suspected  to  be 
reactionaries. 

Large  mental  readjustments  had  to  be  made. 
It  was  not  only  that  Chamberlain  turned  against 
his  maker  and  that  Bright  forsook  his  great 
brother.  In  a  year  or  two  it  became  known 
that  the  Duke  of  Westminster  had  sold  the 
Millais  portrait  of  Mr.  Gladstone  for  money. 
The  Liberal  party  in  those  six  months  of  crisis 
sustained  many  losses  and  made  few  gains.  One 
of  its  gains  was  the  Manchester  Guardian.  In  the 
years  between  1880  and  1885  the  Guardian  had 
been  totally  unattracted  by  the  metallic  Radical- 
ism of  Birmingham.  It  was  still  governed  by  its 
old  Whig  bias,  and  leaned  definitely  towards 
Hartington  and  Goschen.  If  the  sons  of  the 
most  strait-laced  Liberalism  will  throw  back 
their  minds  to  this  period  they  will  find  the 
Manchester   Examiner   and   Times,   and    not    the 

113  H 


Manchester  Guardian,  in  the  furniture  of  old 
associations,  and  heralding  at  home  the  new- 
born day.  The  Guardian  might  have  been  ex- 
pected with  certainty  to  follow  Hartington  into 
a  Whig  secession.  Its  long  habit  of  extreme 
caution  in  politics  seemed  to  prepare  it  for  this 
course  ;  the  weather  at  the  moment  recom- 
mended it.  All  through  the  winter  of  1885, 
and  the  spring  of  1886,  it  can  be  heard  thinking 
aloud  on  this  Irish  question  in  its  leading  columns. 
It  disagreed  with  Mr.  Gladstone's  first  thoughts 
on  the  exclusion  of  the  Irish  members,  but  its 
conversion  to  the  principle  of  Home  Rule  went 
forward  day  by  day.  "  Against  the  transfer  to 
an  Irish  assembly  of  full  practical  control  of  Irish 
affairs  we  have  not  a  word  to  say.  That  is 
the  essence  of  Home  Rule  as  we  understand 
it,  and  Home  Rule  even  in  this  large  sense  we 
are  prepared  to  accept.  The  fundamental  ob- 
jection to  the  Bill  lies  in  the  exclusion  of  the 
Irish  members,"  etc.  (April  9,  1886.)  ''There 
can  be  no  question  now  of  denying  a  measure  of 
Home  Rule."  (April  10.)  "At  whatever  dis- 
advantage, with  whatever  loss,  the  Liberal  party 
must  go  forward  with  a  work  perhaps  the  most 
imperative  and  salutary  which  ever  divolved 
upon  it  in  its  history."  (June  9,  after  the  defeat 
of  the  Bill.)  While  editorial  opinion  was  setting 
into  this  mould.  Professor  Freeman,  in  another 
part  of  the  paper,  was  explaining  the  historical 
and  political  rational  of  Mr.  Gladstone's  policy 
in  a  series  of  signed  articles. 

114 


At  the  same  moment  of  time  the  Manchester 
Examiner  hesitated,  and,  in  the  event,  was  lost. 
Mr.  Gladstone's  conversion  to  Home  Rule  was 
often  described  by  Mr.  Gladstone's  critics  as  the 
sharp  curve  of  politics.  The  Manchester  Ex- 
aminer was  one  of  the  accidents.  For  rather 
more  than  thirty  years  it  had  been  edited  by 
Henry  Dunckley,  and  during  the  whole  of  this 
period  it  had  been  the  authentic  voice  of  the 
Manchester  school  of  politics.  Henry  Dunckley, 
who  had  been  a  Nonconformist  minister  in 
Salford,  was  chosen  to  edit  the  Examiner  because 
he  won  a  prize  offered  by  the  Anti-Corn  Law 
League,  in  1854,  for  an  essay  on  the  history 
and  results  of  its  agitation.  The  essay  was  a 
masterpiece,  and  Dunckley's  editorship  of  the 
Examiner  was  an  affair  of  much  political  and 
literary  distinction.  He  v/rote  a  style  of  great 
strength  and  of  such  simplicity  that  his  readers 
vowed  they  had  never  needed  to  read  a  sentence 
twice  however  subtle  the  thought,  and  he  was 
not  a  man  to  whom  subtlety  never  happened. 
It  is  just  possible  that  as  an  editor  he  was  a  little 
too  sedentary  even  for  the  quiet  days  in  which  his 
lot  was  cast.  People  who  remember  him  in  his 
office  speak  of  his  velvet  jacket  and  cigar,  and  the 
sanctity  of  his  meditations.  They  say  that  in  the 
Examiner  office  a  housekeeper  in  a  black  alpaca 
used  to  go  about  at  ten  at  night  administering 
tea  to  the  stylists  and  the  thinkers.  They  also  say 
that  the  Examiner  missed  the  Tay  Bridge  acci- 
dent, the  sub-editors  having  all  joined  at  a  cab 

"5 


home  shortly  after  the  first  tidings  of  the  disaster 
arrived,  and  that  the  editor  thought  the  excuse 
not  an  unreasonable  one,  seeing  that  it  had 
certainly  been  snowing  hard.  Only  once  was 
he  known  to  indulge  an  editor's  right  to  tear  his 
hair  and  rend  his  garments.  As  one  of  the  most 
important  Liberals  in  the  country,  it  fell  to  him 
during  a  crisis  to  attend  a  momentous  conference 
of  the  party  in  London.  Suspecting  himself  to 
be  the  only  journalist  present,  he  spent  the 
evening  composing  and  wiring  to  the  office  in 
Manchester  a  discreet  but  nevertheless  highly 
inspired  and  intimate  account  of  what  had 
happened,  and  followed  it  up  with  a  private 
telegram  to  the  sub-editor  informing  him  that 
the  message  was  what  would  now  be  called 
"  exclusive."  It  did  not  appear,  and  when 
Dunckley,  on  his  return  to  Manchester,  asked 
why  it  had  not  appeared,  he  received  the  follow- 
ing reasoned  reply  :  "  Well,  sir,  it  was  this  way. 
I  was  much  pressed  for  space  and,  as  you  had 
yourself  said  that  the  other  papers  would  not 
have  anything  about  the  conference,  I  thought 
I  might  safely  leave  it  all  out."  Dunckley 
appears  to  have  thought  that  a  journalistic  mind 
of  this  sort  had  better  exercise  itself  for  the  rest 
of  its  career  in  an  office  which  was  not  his  office. 
And  it  did. 

It  is  certain  that  for  one  reason  and  another 
the  Examiner  ran  to  tops  rather  than  roots. 
But  Dunckley's  hold  on  Liberal  England  was 
extremely  strong.     He  acquired  it  with  a  series 

ii6 


of  articles  in  the  Weekly  Times,  an  offshoot  of 
the  Examifier,  on  the  exact  status  of  the  Crown 
in  the  English  Constitution,  a  subject  on  which 
Radical  opinion  had  been  much  poked  up  by 
certain  objectionable  passages  in  Sir  Theodore 
Martin's  Life  of  the  Prince  Consort.  The 
Quarterly  Review  handled  Dunckley  severely 
for  these  articles,  and  his  reply  made  the  con- 
troversy illustrious.  By  the  time  it  was  con- 
cluded it  had  become  obvious  that  the  "  Letters 
of  Verax  "  must  be  continued,  and  in  their  con- 
tinuation they  roamed  over  all  the  field  of  politics 
and  touched  frequently  on  those  questions  of 
political  theology  which  were  always  burning 
while  England  was  still  ruled  by  its  Non- 
conformist chapels.  It  was  said  that  they  were 
even  more  read  in  the  West  Riding  of  Yorkshire 
than  in  Lancashire,  instructing  great  masses 
of  the  electorate  and  sometimes  turning  by- 
elections. 

Many  people  habitually  swore  by  Dunckley. 
If  you  saw  it  in  a  "  Letter  of  Verax,"  it  was 
so.  There  have  been  few  writers  who  have 
been  more  read  by  people  who  read  nothing 
else  but  the  Book  of  the  Prophet  Isaiah,  and 
indeed  the  wonderful  thing  about  Henry  Dunck- 
ley was  not  so  much  Henry  Dunckley  himself 
— historian  and  scholar,  stylist  and  ironist  though 
he  was — as  his  public,  and  not  so  much  the 
plant  as  the  highly  indoctrinated  soil  in  which 
it  grew.  His  fame  was  his  own,  but  it  was 
also  one  of  the  achievements  of  the   North  of 

117 


England.  After  all,  they  also  write  who  only 
put  on  their  spectacles  and  trim  the  lamp  to  read 
and  consider. 

Largely  under  the  influence  of  John  Bright, 
who  had  been  one  of  its  founders,  the  Examiner 
missed  the  tide  of  Liberal  sentiment  in  1886. 
It  got  away  with  the  next  tide.  In  a  few  weeks 
it  had  "  found  salvation,"  but  the  delay  damaged 
it,  and  it  never  quite  recovered.  Three  years 
later  it  was  sold  to  the  Liberal  Unionist  party, 
and  the  Guardian  acquired  nearly  all  its  public 
goodwill  in  acquiring  the  services  of  Dunckley, 
who  began  in  March,  1889,  to  contribute  a 
weekly  article  under  his  familiar  name  of 
"  Verax."  These  articles  were  continued  until 
his  death  in  i  896,  and  assisted  greatly  in  bringing 
the  old  Examiner  readers  over  to  the  Guardian 
and  making  them  at  home  in  its  columns. 
Dunckley  also  wrote  a  good  deal  for  the  Guardian 
which  was  not  signed.  The  obituary  notice  of 
Mr.  Gladstone  in  1898  had  been  largely  written 
by  him  before  his  own  death. 

§  III 

William  Thomas  Arnold  had  become  a  strong 
influence  in  the  Guardian  office  when  the  de- 
cision on  Home  Rule  was  taken  in  1886,  and 
indeed  Arnold's  best  years  as  a  journalist  were 
spent  on  the  Irish  question.  He  was  the  grand- 
son of  Arnold  of  Rugby  and  the  brother  of 
Mrs.  Humphry  Ward.  Mr.  Scott  visited  Oxford 
in    1879   in   search  of  an   editorial   recruit,   dis- 

118 


^ 


/) 


"^  \ 


,,^ 


«^' 


Wll.l.l  \\1    IIIOM  \S   ARXOI.I). 


covered  Arnold,  and  brought  him  back  to 
Manchester.  From  that  year  until  1896,  when 
he  was  attacked  by  the  illness  which  finally 
terminated  his  brilliant  and  beautiful  life,  Arnold 
was  an  active  and  powerful  member  of  the 
editorial  staff,  and  for  the  second  part  of  the 
period  the  chief  leader-writer.  He  has  a  very 
high  place  in  the  Guardian  calendar,  and  might 
be  named  with  Scott  and  Montague  as  one  of 
the  chief  modern  makers  of  the  paper.  Arnold 
was  an  historian.  He  was,  in  point  of  fact, 
a  specialist  in  Roman  provincial  administration, 
and  it  was  because  he  gave  so  much  of  his  life 
to  journalism  that  his  historical  writing  forms 
only  a  fragment,  valuable  as  that  fragment  is. 
The  journalist,  in  fact,  spoiled  the  historian,  but 
the  historian  perfected  the  journalist.  It  was 
Arnold's  own  theory  that  his  journalism  in  the 
Guardian  office  was  all  the  better  for  his  historical 
studies  at  his  house  in  Nelson  Street,  and  that 
the  morning  and  evening  thus  spent  made  the 
day.  It  is  certain  that  this  absorption  in  a  very 
lonely  field  of  historical  research  did  nothing 
to  stale  his  interest  in  modern  politics  and  in 
the  local  affairs  of  Manchester.  It  merely  added 
the  critical  habit  of  mind  and  a  slight  touch 
of  occasional  "  donnishness."  To  some  extent 
he  shared  Macaulay's  amiable  delusion  about  the 
current  "  schoolboy,"  and  he  was  prone  to  sup- 
pose not  only  that  everybody  had  read  Momm- 
sen,  but  that  everybody  kept  his  own  copy  of 
Mommsen  on  a  convenient  shelf. 

119 


But  as  a  practical,  serviceable  journalist  of 
the  small  hours  Arnold  has  rarely  been  equalled. 
Knowing  everything  about  something  (Roman 
inscriptions),  he  had  the  further  ambition  of 
knowing  something  about  everything.  He  was 
the  architect  of  a  system  of  "  pigeon-holes  " 
which  were  contrived  to  serve  the  cause,  not 
indeed  of  omniscience,  but  of  a  kind  of  omnia- 
consciousness.  His  own  room  at  the  Guardian 
office  was  elaborately  equipped  with  "  pigeon- 
holes," and  was  the  scene  of  an  incessant  alight- 
ing of  doves  from  the  most  remote  climates  of 
the  foreign  reviews,  from  the  cycling  papers, 
from  the  medical,  the  ironmongery,  and  grocery 
papers,  and  indeed  from  everywhere  and  any- 
where where  "  the  facts  "  about  any  subject 
under  the  sun  could  be  collected — virginal  and 
unimpassioned.  Mr.  Montague  has  minutely 
described  this  method  in  a  chapter  of  great 
journalistic  edification  in  the  Arnold  memoir. 

At  his  house  in  Nelson  Street,  the  site  and 
garden  of  which  were  absorbed  into  the  new 
Royal  Infirmary,  Arnold  became  a  local  patriot. 
He  made  the  great  spiritual  discovery  that  there 
was  no  need  to  go  to  London,  and  that  a  region 
bounded  by  the  Pennine  Range  on  the  east  and 
by  Blackpool  promenade  on  the  west  could 
neither  be  outwritten  nor  outgrown.  He  may 
be  taken  as  the  true  founder  of  the  genre  school 
of  Guardian  writers,  a  body  as  defined  and  dis- 
tinguishable in  its  way  as  the  Glasgow  school  of 
art.     The  drama  of  the  town,  and  even  in  course 

I20 


of  time  its  music-halls  of  Empire  and  Hippo- 
drome, its  picture  galleries  and  loan  exhibitions, 
its  concerts,  its  Whit-week,  its  Zoological  Gardens 
at  Belle  Vue,  and  all  its  encircling  scenery  of 
Cheshire  and  Derbyshire  became,  under  the 
stimulus  of  his  first  example,  the  subject  matter 
of  a  critical  attitude,  a  descriptiveness  and  a  habit 
of  hard  writing  resolving  themselves  into  a 
family  style  highly  literary  but  never  bookish, 
and  the  spiritual  secret  of  which  is  a  slight  dis- 
dain of  London,  an  austere  contentment  with 
the  object  before  the  eye,  and  a  grim  determina- 
tion to  write  before  the  end  of  life  more  or  less 
like  Montague.  One  of  the  earliest-gathered 
fruits  of  the  school  was  a  little  volume  on  the 
Manchester  stage.  It  consisted  of  dramatic 
criticisms  in  the  columns  of  the  Guardian  by 
Mr.  Arnold,  Mr.  Montague,  Mr.  Oliver  Elton, 
and  Mr.  Allan  Monkhouse,  and  its  modest  and 
unassuming  appearance  in  the  world  was  yet  an 
event  in  the  literary  treatment  of  the  theatre. 
Mr.  Arthur  Johnstone,  a  musical  critic  and  im- 
pressionist of  great  brilliance,  carried  the  move- 
ment on  from  this  starting-point.  Mr.  J.  B. 
Atkins,  now  of  the  Spectator,  but  formerly  the 
war  correspondent  of  the  Guardian  in  several 
campaigns,  developed  the  Guardian  style  con- 
siderably on  the  side  of  social  and  descriptive 
writing  first  in  Manchester  and  afterwards  in 
London.  It  was  the  achievement  of  Mr.  Atkins 
to  carry  the  Puritan  reader  not  unenjoyably  to 
the  race  meeting  at  Doncaster  or  Epsom. 

121 


These  earlier  efforts  were  made  behind  the 
curtain  of  anonymity,  but  the  school  of  writers 
which  grew  up  around  Arnold,  and  found  in 
Montague  at  once  its  example  and  despair,  be- 
came rather  too  big  for  anonymity.  It  broke 
through.  Initials  were  admitted.  They  became 
recognizable  and  known,  and  several  journalists 
in  Manchester  acquired  the  boulevardish  fame 
of  their  brothers  in  Paris.  It  became  the  regular 
thing  that  a  dramatic  audience  in  Manchester 
should  enjoy  two  performances  for  every  play — 
the  one  in  the  theatre  itself,  the  other  the  next 
morning  in  the  Guardian^  when  the  critic  recited 
the  adventure  of  his  own  soul  in  the  presence  of 
the  masterpiece,  or  the  hollow  thing  of  brass 
and  tinsel,  as  the  case  might  be. 

Long  before  the  growth  of  this  local  school 
of  criticism  the  Guardian  had  been  collecting 
specialists  more  particularly  for  the  reviewing 
of  books.  We  have  already  named  Professor 
Freeman  as  a  contributor,  but  the  paper  has 
always  helped  itself  liberally  from  historical  I 
scholarship.  Mandell  Creighton  was  writing  re- 
views and  leading  articles  for  the  Guardian 
steadily  before  he  became  the  Bishop  of  Peter- 
borough. Goldwin  Smith  was  a  frequent  con- 
tributor. York  Powell  is  one  of  the  treasures 
which  the  Guardian  has  stolen  from  time  to  time 
from  what  is  still  called  the  higher  literature. 
The  men  who  asked  one  another  in  the  common 
rooms  and  at  the  hall  tables  of  Oxford  why 
York    Powell    did    not    put    forth    more    books 

122 


could  have  found  the  answer  in  the  innumerable 
anonymous  articles  which  he  was  writing  for 
the  Manchester  Guardian.  He  was  a  constant 
contributor  of  historical  essays  written  around 
and  about  any  book  sent  to  him  for  review,  and 
a  large  part  of  the  small  but  valuable  completed 
output  of  that  remarkable  writer  is  to  be  found 
in  the  columns  of  the  Guardian  of  his  day. 
Among  other  regular  writers  were  Andrew  Lang 
and  Richard  Jefferies  (the  natural  historian). 
Mr.  George  Saintsbury,  the  critic,  was  on  the 
resident  editorial  staff  in  the  seventies,  and  was  a 
contemporary  in  the  office  with  Mr.  Richard 
Whiteing,  the  novelist.  Mr.  Spenser  Wilkinson 
joined  the  editorial  staff  in  1882,  and  continued 
to  be  a  member  of  it  for  ten  years.  Mr.  John 
Masefield  (for  a  brief  period)  and  Mr.  Filson 
Young  are  old  members  of  the  staff,  and  Stanley 
Houghton,  the  author  of  Hindie  Wakes,  con- 
tributed the  signed  articles  which  now  form  part 
of  his  collected  works,  and  was  a  constant  writer 
of  theatrical  criticism.  Professor  L.  T.  Hob- 
house  joined  the  editorial  staff  in  1898,  and 
brought  with  him  from  Mr.  Scott's  old  college 
at  the  University,  of  which  he  was  a  Fellow, 
a  splendid  combination  of  a  wide  philosophical 
outlook,  of  which  his  books  on  political  and 
sociological  subjects  give  ample  evidence,  together 
with  an  ardent  and  reasoned  Liberalism  and  the 
mastery  of  an  accomplished  style.  Mr.  T.  M. 
Young,  now  the  Deputy  Public  Trustee,  was  for 
some  time  the  city  editor.     Mr.  William  Archer 

123 


was  for  several  years  in  charge  of  the  London 
dramatic  criticism.  Mr.  R.  A.  M.  Stevenson, 
Mr.  Comyns  Carr,  Sir  Claude  Phillips,  Mr. 
D.  S.  MacColl,  Sir  Walter  Armstrong,  Mr. 
Laurence  Housman,  and  Mr.  Sturge  Moore 
have  been  included  in  its  very  strong  succession 
of  art  critics  in  London.  Sir  Arthur  Evans,  the 
well-known  traveller  and  archaeologist,  did  some 
brilliant  work  for  it  in  connection  with  his 
archaeological  surveys  in  the  old  Venetian  lands 
on  the  Eastern  Adriatic,  and  was  for  a  time 
imprisoned  by  the  Austrians  because  of  his 
advocacy  of  the  liberties  of  the  local  population. 
Later,  Mr.  Amery,  now  Under  Secretary  for 
the  Colonies,  acting  as  correspondent  of  the 
Guardian  in  the  same  disturbed  region,  ran 
great  risk  of  being  run  through  the  body  by  a 
Turkish  zaptieh  whom  he  up  and  smote  with 
his  umbrella  in  the  assertion  of  his  rights  as  a 
British  subject  to  go  and  do  what  he  pleased. 
Long  ago  the  paper  gave  to  the  public  much  of 
the  original  writings  of  Ben  Brierley  and  Edwin 
Waugh,  of  the  Lancashire  school  of  writers. 

The  Guardiaji  has  found  many  regular  con- 
tributors in  the  professorate  of  the  Manchester 
University.  Sir  Adolphus  Ward,  the  former 
Principal  of  the  University,  and  now  the  Master 
of  Peterhouse,  Cambridge,  was  the  earliest  of 
its  distinguished  dramatic  critics,  and  has  been 
a  frequent  reviewer  down  even  to  the  present 
day.  Sir  Henry  Roscoe,  Professor  Munroe, 
Mr.  Balfour's  persevering  opponent  in  East  Man- 

124 


Chester  and  a  great  adornment  in  his  time  of  local 
Liberalism,  Professor  Wilkins,  and,  in  the  present 
day.  Professor  Herford  are  among  the  names  of  its 
contributors.  Among  the  ecclesiastics  who  have 
written  regularly  on  Church  questions  have  been 
Professor  Hope  Moulton  and  Canon  Hicks, 
afterwards  Bishop  of  Lincoln,  whose  place  as  the 
writer  of  a  weekly  article  on  affairs  from  a 
Churchman's  point  of  view  was  taken,  and  is 
still  held,  by  Canon  Peter  Green.  Mr.  H.  W. 
Massingham  and  Mr.  Harold  Spender  have  repre- 
sented the  Guardian  in  Parliament,  and  Mr. 
H.  W.  Nevinson  has  acted  for  it  as  a  war  corres- 
pondent and  has  been  a  steady  contributor. 
Mr.  R.  H.  Gretton,  the  historian  of  modern 
England,  was  formerly  in  charge  of  the  London 
office.  Mr.  G.  W.  E.  Russell  began  in  1897, 
and  continued  for  many  years,  in  the  Guardian 
his  recollections  of  the  Whig  society  of  the 
Victorian  age.  The  late  Mr.  Dixon  Scott, 
Mr.  G.  H.  Mair  (who  was  probably  the  first 
journalist  in  England  to  make  an  aeroplane 
flight),  Mr.  Ernest  Newman,  Mr.  John  Drink- 
water,  Mr.  Harold  Brighouse,  Mr.  Glutton  Brock, 
Mr.  J.  A.  Hobson,  Mr.  H.  N.  Brailsford,  Mr. 
Lowes  Dickinson,  Mr.  J.  E.  Agate,  Mr.  J.  L. 
Hammond,  and  (in  the  most  recent  times)  Mr. 
Maurice  Hewlett,  Mr.  R.  H.  Tawney,  and  Mr. 
J.  M.  Keynes  are  among  the  many  authors  and 
critics  who  have  found  their  journalistic  outlet 
in  the  columns  of  the  Manchester  Guardian. 
The  present  staff,  which   maintains  all  the  old 

125 


accustomed  strength,  includes  Mr.  W.  P.  Crozier, 
who  has  had  much  to  do  with  the  modernization 
of  the  paper,  and  Mr.  James  Bone,  who  com- 
bines the  charge  of  the  London  office  with  the 
function  of  art  critic.  Mr.  J.  J.  O'Neill,  the 
late  Liberal  candidate  for  Preston,  is  the  valued 
head  of  the  advertisement  branch  of  the  paper. 
The  "  Miscellany  "  column,  to  which  crowds  of 
professional  and  amateur  journalists  have  brought 
their  offerings,  began  to  appear  in  the  autumn 
of  1903.  Later  on,  the  back-page  article  was 
established,  and  has  become  one  of  the  standing 
targets  of  literary  marksmanship. 


126 


VII  :   THE  SOUL  OF  A  NEWSPAPER 


CHAPTER     VII 

The  Soul  of  a  ^N^wspaper 

§1 

THE  Irish  question  was  to  the  Manchester 
Guardian  hterally,  and  in  no  figure  of 
speech,  a  Liberal  education.  Gladstonian- 
ism  began  with  the  Irish  question,  but  it  trans- 
cended it.  It  developed  into  a  political  attitude 
and  mentality  which  we  describe  when  we  say 
that  it  is  of  all  things  in  the  world  the  precise 
and  exact  opposite  of  Prussianism.  It  called 
upon  the  ruler  to  put  himself  imaginatively  into 
the  place  of  the  ruled.  It  became  a  feeling  for  the 
nationality  of  other  people.  Still  more  to  the  point 
at  which  we  have  now  arrived,  it  inured  those  who 
followed  it  to  the  unpleasant  process  of  thinking 
and  acting  against  the  grain  of  a  facile  patriotism, 
and  living  in  allegiance  to  that  other  country 
which  is  also  theirs  and  is  bounded  on  the  north, 
the  south,  the  east  and  the  west,  not  by  political 
frontiers,  but  by  the  moral  idea.  From  Ireland 
to  South  Africa  was  a  change  of  scene,  but 
hardly  a  change  of  mind,  and  the  statesman 
who  had  most  to  do  with  the  defeat  of  the  two 
Home  Rule  Bills  was  also  the  statesman  who 
brought  a  restless  and  aggressive  Imperialism 
on  to  the  scene  of  affairs.  The  Manchester 
Guardian  itself  was  about  to  enter  upon  a  chapter 
in  which  it  was  set  inflexibly  against  the  national 
will.     A  new  and  highly  inconvenient  patriotic 

129  I 


exercise  known  as  "  giving  up  the  Guardian  " 
was  soon  to  be  seen  practised  for  the  first  time 
in  first-class  carriages  running  into  Manchester. 
It  was  often  performed  with  great  pomp  and 
circumstance  ;  newsagents,  who  were  not  re- 
sponsible for  the  opinions  of  the  paper,  being 
addressed  on  the  subject  across  their  counters 
as  though  they  were  public  meetings.  There 
are  some  who  cherish  to  this  day  the  simple 
child-like  faith  that  the  Guardian  takes  foreign 
money,  and  would  be  left  almost  helpless  in 
controversy  wdth  it  if  told  that  it  is  even  not  so. 
The  paper  needed  all  its  roots  in  the  family  life 
of  Manchester,  in  its  commerce,  its  markets,  its 
churches,  its  music  and  art  and  sport  to  survive 
the  w^eather  which  beat  upon  it  during  the  South 
African  War.  But  these  roots  held  well  enough, 
and  it  is  a  curious  but  reassuring  fact  that  many 
people,  after  "  giving  up  the  Guardian  "  for  one 
offence,  were  found  to  be  in  a  position  to  "  give 
it  up  "  again  somewhat  later,  the  circumstance 
affording  some  evidence  of  a  secret  reconciliation 
in  the  meantime. 

It  is  not  often  that  we  find  such  sharp  de- 
partures in  history,  but  if  England  had  only 
known  it,  she  was  hearing,  when  she  heard  the 
news  of  the  Jameson  Raid,  of  the  end  of  her 
peace.  Since  that  event  the  world  has  known 
no  rest.  It  was  the  first  sudden  symptom  of  a 
deep  disorder.  If  English  politics  before  1896 
be  compared  with  English  politics  since  1896, 
it  will  be  seen  that  a  change  in  the  character  of 

130 


public  questions  took  place  about  that  year. 
Before  1896  politics  were  concerned  very  largely 
with  man  as  an  Anglican  or  Baptist,  with  man 
as  a  teetotaller  or  not  a  teetotaller,  with  man  as  a 
single  or  peradventure  a  plural  voter.  Theology 
entered  very  largely  into  politics.  Large  masses 
of  people  voted  one  way  or  the  other  accord- 
ing as  they  were  or  were  not  of  a  Puritan  strain. 
Someone  before  1896  had  compiled  a  Handbook 
to  the  Political  Questions  oj  the  Day,  and,  if  this 
book  be  examined,  it  will  be  found  that  the 
arguments,  pro  and  con,  are  marshalled  on  a 
number  of  questions,  most  of  them  having  this 
common  characteristic  :  that  no  one  would  be  one 
penny  the  better  or  worse  whatever  the  decision. 
Should  the  Church  in  Wales  be  disestablished 
and  disendowed  ;  should  the  Church  in  England  ; 
should  the  inhabitants  of  a  given  area  have  the 
power  to  determine  whether  there  should  be  any, 
and,  if  so,  how  many,  licences  for  the  sale  of  in- 
toxicating drink  ;  should  the  Bible  be  taught 
in  schools  to  whose  support  Jews  and  agnostics 
were  compelled  to  contribute — was  it  possible 
to  teach  the  Bible  without  doctrinal  comment  ? 
The  argument  of  these  questions  by  recognized 
gladiators  was  the  characteristic  feature  of  English 
life.  It  was  as  typical  of  England  as  the  bull- 
fight is  of  Spain.  It  is  a  curious  fact  that  while 
hardly  one  of  these  questions  was  settled  by  the 
disputants,  they  have  nearly  all  by  now  settled 
themselves.  The  education  question,  for  example, 
which  was  not  an  education  question  at  all,  but  a 

131 


theological  one,  has  totally  evaporated  In  a  new 
climate  of  affairs.  It  has  been  settled  not  by 
consent,  but  by  default.  When  it  was  last  before 
the  court  no  one  appeared  on  either  side,  and 
the  case  was  struck  out  of  the  list. 

The  two  armies  of  Liberal  and  Conservative, 
the  Montagues  and  the  Capulets  of  Church 
and  Dissent,  had  very  little  idea  what  a  large 
mass  of  the  population  it  was  that  took  little  or 
no  interest  in  their  contentions  and  very  much 
preferred  the  racecourse.  The  Jameson  Raid 
was  the  signal  for  these  people  to  join  in.  The 
game  of  African  Imperialism  had  begun,  and 
it  was  a  game  which  everybody  could  under- 
stand. It  was  felt  that  this  was  going  to  be  as 
good  as  hunting.  The  Jameson  raiders  were 
brought  to  London  for  their  trial,  and  were 
severely  scolded  by  Lord  Russell  of  Killowen, 
but  their  sunburnt  faces  and  extremely  smart 
neckties  made  a  deep  impression  on  the  new 
attentive  England.  The  Jameson  raiders  having 
been  duly  punished  and  petted,  Mr.  Chamber- 
lain raised  the  claim  to  the  suzerainty  of  the 
Transvaal,  and  began  with  great  dexterity  to 
manoeuvre  President  Kruger  and  the  Boer 
farmers,  through  the  mazes  of  the  five  years 
franchise  and  the  seven  years  franchise,  to  the 
verge  of  the  precipice  over  which  they  eventually 
slipped.  "  More  and  more,"  wrote  Mr.  C.  P. 
Scott,  from  the  Guardian  office  to  Leonard 
Courtney,  about  this  time  in  a  letter  published 
in   Courtney's  life — "  more  and   more  one  feels 

132 


that    foreign    policy    is    the    touchstone    of    all 
policy." 

Political  Imperialism  was  succeeded  by  econo- 
mic Imperialism.  When  Mr.  Chamberlain  began 
his  fiscal  campaign  he  was  mainly  an  Imperialist, 
and  only  incidentally  a  Protectionist,  but  the 
Imperialism  was  quickly  brushed  on  one  side, 
large  and  powerful  interests  having  seen  in  the 
other  aspect  of  the  question  what  they  would  in 
their  own  language  call  a  *'  business  proposition  " 
of  the  highest  interest  and  importance.  These 
were  indeed  practical  politics  !  The  country 
gave  the  movement  a  severe  check  at  the  election 
of  1906,  but  a  period  of  great  secret  activity 
followed  in  foreign  politics.  The  striking  fall 
in  the  tone  of  public  life  which  had  now  taken 
place  was  indicated  when  the  Irish  question  was 
raised  after  an  interval  of  fifteen  years,  and  the 
responsible  leaders  of  the  Unionist  party  identified 
themselves  cordially  with  flat  rebellion,  and  set 
an  example  which  was  followed  right  and  left — 
by  militant  suffragists,  and  by  Labour  men  who 
turned  with  disdain  from  the  House  of  Commons 
and  had  no  use  even  for  the  discipline  of  the 
old  trade  union.  Then  came  the  ripening  of  all 
these  things  in  the  European  War.  The  new 
times  which  we  have  thus  sketched  had  been 
served  throughout  their  course  by  a  new  kind 
of  press  which  was  impatient  of  speeches  and 
called  voraciously  morning  after  morning  for 
events. 


m 


§11 

The  notable  part  which  the  Manchester  Guar- 
dian has  played  against  the  whole  gamut  of 
this  movement  was  first  definitely  assumed  in 
the  days  before  the  South  African  War,  when 
the  minority  in  England  was  watching  with 
anguish  the  diplomatic  performances  of  Mr. 
Chamberlain.  The  Guardian  not  only  fought 
the  battle  in  its  leading  articles,  but  it  nourished 
into  being  the  "  Manchester  Transvaal  Com- 
mittee," which  called  the  historic  meeting  of 
protest  at  the  St.  James's  Hall  on  September  i  5, 
1899.  ^^  ^^'^^  ^  member  of  the  staff"  of  the 
Manchester  Guardian  who  visited  Lord  Morley, 
then  living  at  Hawarden,  where  he  was  writing 
the  Lije  of  Gladstone^  and  prevailed  upon  him 
to  come.  Mr.  Scott  himself  summoned  Courtney 
from  Beachy  Head.  A  son  of  Bright  took  the 
chair,  and  a  daughter  of  Gladstone  was  on  the 
platform.  Lord  Morley's  own  diaries  describe 
the  meeting,  telling  how  he  was  met  by  appre- 
hensive faces  at  the  Exchange  Station  ;  how  the 
war  party  had  publicly  advertised  and  en- 
couraged attempts  to  smash  the  meeting  ;  how 
young  men  had  been  earnestly  exhorted  in 
patriotic  prints,  at  least  for  one  night  to  sacrifice 
their  billiards  and  tobacco  for  the  honour  of 
their  native  land  ;  how  the  huge  St.  James's 
Hall  was  packed  as  it  had  never  been  packed 
before,  and  how  the  chairman  was  ruthlessly 
shouted  down. 

But  Lord  Morley's  account  of  the  affair  does 

134 


something  less  than  justice  to  the  courage  of 
his  own  contention  with  the  crowd,  to  the  victory 
of  mind  over  matter,  inch  by  inch,  sentence  by 
sentence,  here  a  little  and  there  a  little,  but  at 
last  so  complete  that  the  closing  words  of  his 
speech  were  heard  in  a  silence  the  very  un- 
willingness of  which  added,  if  anything  could 
add,  to  their  sombre  beauty.  They  form  one 
of  the  best  examples  modern  speaking  affords 
of  the  use  of  the  great  organ  stop  in  politics. 

I  ask  myself  very  often  in  my  doctrinaire  study 
whether  the  man  with  the  sword  blundering  in  and 
slashing  at  knots  which  patient  statesmen  might  have 
untied  is  not  responsible  for  half  the  worst  catastrophes 
in  the  political  history  of  Europe.  Yes,  you  may 
carry  fire  and  sword  into  the  midst  of  peace  and  in- 
dustry. Such  a  war  of  one  of  the  strongest  Govern- 
ments of  the  world  against  this  weak  little  Republic 
will  bring  you  no  glory.  It  will  bring  you  no  profit, 
but  mischief.  It  will  be  wrong.  It  will  make 
thousands  of  women  widows  and  children  fatherless. 
It  will  be  wrong.  You  may  add  a  new  province  to 
your  Empire.  It  will  still  be  wrong.  You  may  give 
greater  buoyancy  to  the  South  African  stock  markets. 
You  may  create  South  African  booms.  You  may  send 
the  price  of  Mr.  Rhodes's  Chartereds  to  a  point  be- 
yond the  dreams  of  avarice.  Yet  even  then  it  will 
still  be  wrong. 

In  less  than  a  month  of  the  uttering  of  these 
words  war  was  declared.  The  Guardian  placed 
on  record  its  remonstrance. 

No  sane  man  among  us  can  look  back  on  all  that 
has  happened  since  the  Jameson  Raid  and  honestly 
deny  that  step  by  step  the  Boers  have  been  driven 

^2S 


to  the  dizzy  edge  of  the  precipice  as  systematically 
and  mercilessly  as  ever  a  weak  and  weakly  governed 
nation  was  driven  by  an  adroit  diplomatist  wielding 
the  resources  of  a  great  Power.  We  are  now  on  the 
eve  of  the  period  when  the  discussion  of  the  causes 
of  the  war  is  more  or  less  silenced  by  the  din  of  war 
itself.  But  it  is  something  to  have  made  it  clear  to 
the  world,  as  the  peace  movement  of  the  last  few  weeks 
has  done,  that  this  is  a  war  into  which  the  better  part 
of  England  will  enter  with  a  heavy  heart,  with  an  up- 
right man's  regret  and  resentment  at  the  conduct  of 
agents  who  have  placed  him  in  an  ignoble  position, 
and  with  the  most  earnest  hope  that  the  struggle  may 
be  short,  and  that  the  early  easy  success  of  our  forces 
may  be  followed  by  a  peace  in  which  some  of  the 
credit  lost  to  us  may  be  restored  by  a  magnanimous 
use  of  our  power. 

This  hope  was  eventually  made  good,  though 
it  was  not  to  be  foreseen  when  the  words  were 
written  how  and  by  whom.  Dark  days  followed, 
and  the  lot  of  the  peace  party  went  from  bad  to 
worse  as  the  war  turned  out  to  be,  not  the  full- 
dress  parade  which  had  been  expected,  but  a 
troublesome  affair  of  money  and  time  and  lives. 
The  Guardian  office  was  often  threatened  with 
physical  violence,  and  was  sometimes  under 
police  protection,  as,  somewhat  to  his  discontent, 
was  Mr.  Scott's  own  house.  It  is  a  chapter 
in  the  history  of  the  Manchester  Guardian  which 
should  be  turned  over  with  pleasure  even  by 
those  who  think  the  paper  was  wrong  on  the 
merits  of  the  South  African  War.  That  the 
decision  to  oppose  the  war  was  taken  without  the 
smallest   regard   to   the   commercial   interests   of 

136 


the  paper  is  personal  to  the  Manchester  Guardian 
itself,  but  that  the  risk  should  have  been  run 
with  perfect  success  reflects  hopefully  on  the 
conditions  of  public  life  in  England,  and  lights 
a  lamp  on  the  roadway  of  faith.  A  newspaper 
lives,  and  must  live,  by  its  advertisements  and 
circulation,  or  by  a  combination  of  the  two. 
There  have  been  newspapers  which  have  com- 
plained of  this  hard  fact,  and  have  held  it  re- 
sponsible for  the  extinction  of  some  truth  which 
they  would  have  liked  to  preach,  but  the  world 
would  not  let  them.  It  is,  however,  only  an 
application  of  the  truth  that  the  soul  needs  first 
of  all  a  body.  The  Word  must  become  a  sound 
and  serviceable  incarnation,  and  just  as  the 
highest  spiritual  life  must  be  based  on  the  hum- 
drum virtues,  and  a  man  cannot  be  a  saint  of 
the  Church  if  he  snaps  at  his  family  at  home 
or  neglects  to  answer  his  letters,  so  a  perfectly 
fearless  and  independent  journalism  must  be 
based  on  great  journalistic  quality  and  temper. 

It  must,  in  fact,  be  well  timbered.  It  must 
be  able  to  get  itself  read,  dullness  being  the 
one  deadly  sin  against  truth  since  it  stops  the 
ears  of  receptivity.  It  must  learn,  over  a  course, 
of  many  years,  to  be  depended  on  implicitly 
for  the  facts.  It  must  know  that  there  is  a  time 
to  write  and  a  time  to  refrain  from  writing, 
and  that  it  is  often  the  highest  controversial 
wisdom  to  change  the  subject  and  to  fall  to 
talking  with  love  and  knowledge  about  a  new 
bowler    for    the    Lancashire    team,    the    annual 

137 


pantomime,  or  the  Old  Infirmary  Site,  or  any 
other  topic  which  arose  before  and  will  outlast 
the  state  of  policy  and  parties.  It  must  weave 
away  at  the  plain  homespun  of  reputation. 
Great  affairs  in  their  place,  but  not  all  over  the 
place  !  If  a  newspaper  has  these  reserves  of 
character  and  authority  and  versatility  it  will 
probably  be  able  to  give  the  world  as  much 
truth  as  it  is  able  to  bear.  To  give  it  more  is  to 
give  it  none.  Such,  at  any  rate,  has  been  the 
experience  of  the  Manchester  Guardian.  It  was 
not  for  nothing  that  the  first  John  Edward 
Taylor,  whose  politics  disappointed  so  many 
of  his  friends,  had  yet  the  habit  of  looking 
twice  at  every  paragraph  before  it  appeared  in 
the  Manchester  Guardian^  and  that  the  second 
John  Edward  Taylor  added  enterprise  to  truth. 
These  things  made  possible  its  modern  *'  liberty 
of  prophesying  "  under  Mr.  C.  P.  Scott. 

At  the  time  of  the  South  African  War  de- 
cisions of  policy  were,  and  for  many  years  had 
been,  in  the  keeping  of  Mr.  Scott,  but  the 
ultimate  ownership  of  the  paper  was  still  with 
Mr.  John  Edward  Taylor.  For  many  years 
Mr.  Taylor  had  lived  in  London,  and  his  visits 
to  Manchester  after  1870  were  only  occasional, 
though  he  figured  prominently  in  Lancashire 
politics  for  a  brief  hour  in  1874,  when  he  stood 
unsuccessfully  with  Mr.  Peter  Rylands  as  Liberal 
candidate  for  the  undivided  constituency  of 
South-east  Lancashire,  the  association  of  the 
two  men  deriving  some  interest  from  the  asso- 

138 


JOHN    iiDWAKl)     r.WLOR, 

Editf)-."  of  the  Mdiirliiwter  (inaidiaii  IViin  16<:1  lill  1871  and  propricti:!-  until  liJOj. 


ciation  of  their  fathers,  the  one  as  the  prisoner 
at  the  bar  and  the  other  as  foreman  of  the  jury, 
at  the  trial  at  Lancaster  in  1 8 19.  As  the  pro- 
prietor of  a  newspaper,  the  second  John  Edward 
Taylor  had  the  high  virtue  of  choosing  an  editor 
wisely  and  then  abiding  by  his  choice.  He  was, 
however,  in  the  fullest  sympathy  with  Mr. 
Scott's  decision  on  the  South  African  War  and 
the  even  more  momentous  decision  on  the  Irish 
question.  His  own  attitude  towards  the  ques- 
tions on  which  the  Guardian  made  its  mark 
has  been  described  by  an  intimate  hand,  the 
words  standing  for  him  who  wrote  them  almost 
as  well  as  for  him  about  whom  they  were  written  : 

.  .  .  Mr.  Taylor  took  a  deep  and  abiding  interest 
in  another  great  question  affecting  the  lives  of  the 
poor — that  of  temperance, — and  his  strong  feeling 
on  this  subject  helped  to  stimulate  and  deepen  his 
convictions  in  the  whole  range  of  domestic  politics. 
Indeed,  there  took  place  with  him  a  process  the  con- 
verse of  that  commonly  attributed  to  advancing  years. 
Age  brought  to  him  no  weakening  of  popular  sym- 
pathies, no  narrowing  of  the  outlook  upon  life  ;  above 
all,  no  tolerance  of  high-handed  wrong,  whether  com- 
mitted by  others  or  by  ourselves.  To  the  modern 
materialism,  to  the  new  assertion  of  the  ancient  doc- 
trine that  might  is  right,  to  the  plea  for  national 
selfishness  as  the  true  guide  of  the  policy  of  States, 
he  remained  irreconcilably  opposed,  and,  in  the 
strength  of  this  antagonism,  he  was  fired  in  his  age 
with  something  of  the  ardour  of  youth. 

One  other  thing  remains  to  be  told  of  Mr. 
Taylor.     One  day  in    1873   ^^  %^y^  the  order 

139 


that  from  that  day  and  thenceforward  racing 
"  tips  "  were  not  to  appear  in  the  paper.  No 
announcement  of  any  kind  was  made  on  the 
subject.  The  thing  was  just  done,  and  has 
never  been  undone.  Mr.  Taylor  died  in  1905. 
Under  the  terms  of  his  will  Mr.  C.  P.  Scott 
became  the  purchaser  of  the  Manchester  Guardian 
and  the  governing  director  of  the  family  com- 
pany to  which  it  still  belongs.  Mr.  Taylor's 
interest  in  the  Manchester  Evening  News,  which 
had  been  founded  in  1868,  passed  to  his  nephew, 
Mr.  Russell  Allen,  of  Davenham  Hall,  North- 
wich,  who  became  the  sole  proprietor  of  that 
journal. 

The  Guardian  came  out  of  the  South  African 
War  in  possession  of  great  prestige.  For  some 
eleven  years — from  about  1903  till  19 14 — it 
had  the  experience,  foreign  almost  to  its  genius 
and  not  perhaps  altogether  to  its  taste,  of  being 
with  the  majority,  and  during  these  days  of  a 
high  party  spirit  it  was  the  object  of  a  great 
personal  affection  from  the  Liberal  party.  Its 
name  was  almost  as  good  for  "  cheers  "  in  a 
Liberal  meeting  as  the  name  of  Gladstone,  and 
a  long  and  elaborate  eulogy  of  it  pronounced 
by  Mr.  Churchill  in  the  Manchester  Reform 
Club  in  1909  evoked  from  an  audience  of  leading 
Liberals  an  extraordinary  demonstration.  There 
were  questions,  indeed,  on  which  it  continued  to 
take  its  own  line.  Militancy  never  weakened  for 
one  moment  its  old  and  steadfast  belief  in  women's 
suffrage.    It  continued,  as  it  always  will  continue, 

140 


to  be  genuinely  pained  and  surprised  by  the  wide- 
spread popular  indifference  to  proportional 
representation,  or  *'  P.R.,"  as  the  standard  width 
of  the  Guardian  column  has  compelled  it  to 
christen  that  seductive  cause. 

The  closing  years  of  this  period  were  darkened 
by  the  shadows  of  war.  The  Guardian  steadily 
discouraged  competition  in  Dreadnoughts  which, 
as  the  events  of  the  war  showed,  had  nothing 
to  do  with  naval  efficiency.  It  pleaded  for  open 
diplomacy  ;  suggested  a  new  Triplice  of  Eng- 
land, France,  and  Germany  ;  did  and  said 
everything  that  was  possible  in  the  regions  of 
politics,  music,  art,  and  travel,  to  promote  Anglo- 
German  friendship.  Germany  herself  would  not 
have  it  so  but,  as  the  calamity  came  rapidly  on 
in  July,  1 9 14,  the  Guardian  struggled  to  the 
last  to  avert  it.  It  is  curious  to  turn  to  the 
Guardian  of  the  last  few  days  before  the  war 
and  to  see  the  volume  of  peace  sentiment  pouring 
through  its  pages — Christian  and  social  workers 
of  every  kind  carrying  peace  resolutions  wherever 
they  were  assembled,  the  Nonconformist  churches 
getting  ready  to  play  their  historic  part.  Then 
Germany  broke  into  Belgium,  and  the  peace 
movement  in  England  was  at  an  end. 

And  yet,  once  in  the  war,  few  newspapers 
contributed  more  than  the  Manchester  Guardian 
to  its  strategy.  It  was  almost  the  first  news- 
paper in  England  to  perceive  that  the  war  front 
was  all  one,  and  for  at  least  six  months  it  was 
advocating  alone  the    "  united   front  "   and  the 

141 


"  united   single   command."     These   ideas   were 
expressed  chiefly  in  the  brilUant  articles  of  Mr. 
Herbert    Sidebotham,    the    "  Student    of  War," 
who  was  a  principal  leader-writer  on  the  paper 
and  had  discovered  a  genius  for  military  criticism 
during    the    South    African    War.     It    is    well 
known    that    these    articles    became    extremely 
authoritative,   and    did    much   to    make   opinion 
in  quarters  where  to  make  opinion  is  to  make 
history.     But,  for  all  that,  the   Guardian  never 
ceased    to    welcome    every    possible    overture    of 
practicable  peace.     It  was  the  personal  friend  of 
President   Wilson    and    the   strong   supporter   of 
the    ideas    with    which    he    entered    the    Peace 
Conference   at   Paris. 

Since  the  war  the  main  stem  of  the  paper  has  put 
forth  two  young  branches.  One  of  them  is  the 
Manchester  Guardian  Weekly^  published  for  the 
convenience  of  distant  readers  and  containing  week 
by  week  the  essence  of  Guardian  political  and 
literary  criticism,  and  the  other  the  Manchester 
Guardian  Commercial^  to  which  has  been  lent  the 
long  practice  of  the  parent  paper  in  business  affairs 
and  its  high  authority  with  business  men. 

§111 

As  we  take  our  last  look  at  the  Manchester 
Guardian^  and  leave  it  stepping  out  on  the  long 
stretch  of  its  second  century,  we  see  it  stamped 
with  an  image  and  superscription.  The  history 
of  the  paper  as  we  look  back  upon  it  over  one 
hundred    years  is  an  affair  of  much  symmetry, 

142 


'I'll.:    siiK   t)K    in 


!•;     "   MAMIIKSTER     (iL  ARDIW 
AS     II    WAS    IN   1821. 


lU   ll.DIXt 


round  numbers  abounding.*  It  is  exactly  one 
century  since  it  was  born  ;  it  is  exactly  half  a 
century  since  Charles  Prestwich  Scott  came  to 
Manchester  to  take  up  his  life's  work  in  its 
office.  Almost  his  first  duty  on  joining  the 
staff  was  to  take  his  part  in  the  jubilee  celebra- 
tions, and  there  are  men  still  connected  with  the 
paper,  and  others  living  who  have  only  recently 
left  it,  who  remember  his  high  post-graduate 
spirits  on  that  occasion,  the  joyful  noise  he  made 
as  the  omnibuses  jolted  home  out  of  Cheshire. 
Mr.  Scott's  editorship  still  continues  in  its  full 
career,  and  however  we  weigh  and  measure 
what  he  counts  for  in  its  affairs — whether  we 
test  it  by  the  number  of  things  both  great  and 
small  which  he  decides,  by  the  hours  early  and 
late  which  he  gives  to  its  service,  or  by  the 
number  of  nights  in  the  week  on  which  it  is 
known  in  the  office  that  "  C.  P.  is  writing  the 
*  long,'  "  if  we  even  compute  it  thus  by  the 
number  of  columns  he  contributes  to  the  paper 
in  the  course  of  a  year — he  is  still  not  only  pro- 
prietor and  editor  of  the  paper,  but  its  most 
dominant  voice  and  pen. 

His  editorship  has  been  one  of  the  illustrious 
things  of  journalism  at  large,  but  to  the  Man- 
chester Guardian  it  has  been  all  in  all.  The 
history  of  the  Manchester  Guardian  for  the  last 
fifty  years  is  the  history  of  his  mind.  Its  sensi- 
tiveness to  moral  ideas,  its  intolerance  of  the 
high  hand,  its  dislike  of  the  magisterial  brow  are 

*  Written  in  1921. 


his.  He  has  given  it  a  new  kind  of  noncon- 
formist conscience  which  allows  for  all  the  arts 
of  life  and  bases  a  stern  righteousness,  not  like 
the  old  Puritans  at  the  bear-baiting,  on  hatred  of 
the  spectators  but  rather  on  love  of  the  victim. 
His  staff  know  that  in  the  last  twenty  years  his 
character  has  not  indeed  softened,  for  its  tonic 
and  electric  quality  is  still  very  palpable,  but 
mellowed  very  greatly  beneath  the  final  touches 
of  experience  and  some  private  sorrows,  and 
this  quality  of  mellowness  is  also  in  the  Guardian. 
Its  refusal  to  be  terrified  by  new  portents  like 
the  sex  movement  and  the  Labour  movement  is 
merely  his  spiritual  inability  to  grow  old,  which 
shows  itself  on  the  physical  side  in  the  breathless 
risks  he  runs  on  a  bicycle  amid  the  traffic  of 
Manchester  when  the  traffic  is  at  its  worst,  and 
at  all  Guardian  celebrations,  where  he  dances 
every  dance  on  the  programme  except  when 
the  next  one  is,  to  his  visible  regret,  one  of 
the  very  modern  kind  which  he  has  not  had 
the  time  and  opportunity  to  acquire. 

Mr.  Scott's  life  has  contained  other  careers 
besides  that  of  editorship.  He  fought  several 
elections  as  the  Liberal  candidate  for  North- 
east Manchester,  and  was  eventually  elected  for 
the  Leigh  division  of  Lancashire  in  1895.  He 
took  some  part  in  the  debates  of  Parliament, 
but  he  was  not  born,  as  some  men  are,  to  be  a 
private  member  of  the  House.  He  lacked  the 
nerve  which  the  private  member  needs  for  the 
scattering  and  expense  of  time,  nor  had  he  the 

144 


THE  SITE  ro-n.\v 


necessary  faculty  of  holding  Roman  principles 
in  restful  attitudes  and  beneath  ascending  wreaths 
of  smoke.  In  1905  he  left  Parliament,  made 
Manchester  his  centre  again,  and,  though  he 
had  never  relaxed  his  hold  on  the  Guardian, 
entered  with  a  definite  renewal  of  the  spirit  upon 
his  editorship.  He  came  home.  It  was  said  of 
Chamberlain  by  an  observer  that  he  seemed 
to  make  fresh  beginnings  and  to  discover  and 
develop  new  powers  in  the  art  of  public  speak- 
ing after  he  was  fifty  years  of  age,  and  the  man 
who  made  the  observation  thought  the  fact 
an  unusual  one  in  human  experience.  Mr.  Scott 
has  bettered  the  example,  and  has  enlarged  the 
hopes  of  the  sixth  and  even  the  seventh  decade 
of  human  life,  for  there  is  no  question  that  his 
wrist  for  English  prose  is  easier  and  more  flexible 
than  it  was  twenty  or  even  ten  years  ago.  The 
style  has  reached  that  high  degree  of  excellence 
which  only  comes  when  style  is  hid  with  thought, 
when  it  is  indeed  no  longer  style  but  merely 
the  diaphanous  vesture  of  the  thing  which  it  is 
in  his  mind  and  of  his  purpose  to  say. 

Mr.  Scott  produces  the  most  of  his  work 
among  the  untempered  conditions  of  a  news- 
paper office  at  night.  He  is  always  accessible, 
and  his  assistants  may  without  excessive  fear  and 
trembling  break  in  upon  him  with  unseasonable 
topics — with  a  telegram  which  has  been  cor- 
rupted in  transit  and  which  nobody  can  emend, 
with  some  delicate  question  perhaps  of  "  giving 
it  "   or   "  leaving   it   out."     The   most   the   tor- 

145  K 


mentor  will  notice  is  a  brief  abstraction,  a  momen- 
tary difficulty  in  coming  to  the  surface  of  life. 
The  matter,  whatever  it  be,  will  receive  attention, 
and  if  the  intruder  glances  over  his  shoulder 
from  the  door  he  will  see  that  the  mind  has  picked 
up  the  train  of  its  thought  again,  and  that  the 
hand  is  travelling  over  the  paper  beneatli  the  green 
lamp.  He  keeps  the  conscience  of  the  paper 
and  looks  closely  to  its  personal  form.  He  can- 
not away  with  the  word  "  reliability,"  will  not 
suffer  anything  to  happen  in  the  "  metropolis," 
and  is  the  only  member  of  his  own  staff  who 
understands  clearly  when  the  conjunction  should 
be  '*  nor  "  and  when  it  should  be  '*  or,"  and, 
when  one  follows  the  other,  what  happens  next. 
If  any  very  bad  cliche  appears  he  will  send  the 
proof  in  which  the  offence  occurs  to  the  re- 
sponsible subordinate  with  a  pained  note  of 
exclamation.  It  is  one  of  the  things  that  make 
the  difference  in  the  Guardian  office  that  the 
editor  requires  nothing  of  his  men  that  he  could 
not  do  equally  well  himself. 

And  if  it  be  asked  how  all  this  is  done,  not 
only  without  any  dishevelment  and  discom- 
posure of  living,  but  with  rather  more  than  less 
attention  to  its  airs  and  graces,  the  teaching 
which  is  contained  in  the  answer  is  easy  to  frame 
and  yet  hard  to  follow,  since  it  requires  no  less 
than  the  whole  of  life.  It  has  been  said  that  the 
Essays  of  Emerson  were  not  so  much  written  as 
assembled  out  of  the  notebooks  of  an  unceasing 
application   and,   when   the   greatest   of   English 

146 


artists  was  asked  how  long  it  had  taken  him  to 
make  the  rough  sketch  of  a  human  hand,  he 
repUed  that  it  had  taken  him  all  his  life. 
In  the  same  way  the  editorship  of  a  great  organ, 
the  rapid  decision,  the  finished  argument  com- 
posed against  time  do  not  come  of  a  posture 
towards  affairs  sometimes  assumed  and  some- 
times relaxed.  The  spring  is  easy  because  the 
poise  is  always  maintained.  The  burden  is 
carried  because  it  is  never  laid  down.  Not 
even  after  fifty  years  of  carrying  it  ! 


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